8 ms·

Religion may become extinct in nine nations

86 points by marcog1 16y ago

bartonfink 16y ago
I find this very interesting, and I hope that they get it peer reviewed somewhere so it's more "official" than arxiv. I don't normally view religion as a social activity, and this analysis seems to hinge on social factors (i.e. it seems to be counting edges instead of nodes). Religion doesn't seem to necessitate multiple people in the same way that language does, so I wonder whether their model might be fundamentally flawed. Looks like my pile of papers to read just got a couple pages higher. The link to download the paper is here if anyone wants it. http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1375 http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1375
- _delirium 16y ago
  I don't normally view religion as a social activity ... Religion doesn't seem to necessitate multiple people in the same way that language does I believe there's some disagreement over whether religion is characterized as primarily a set of beliefs individuals hold, or primarily a sociological phenomenon. Clearly most religions have a mixture of both, so the disagreement is over which is more important or definitional. I think most sociologists tend to see it as more of a social phenomenon, with the role of shared beliefs being just one kind of social glue. Linguistically, we don't seem to call personal beliefs that one person holds, not shared by anyone else, a "religion"; religions seem to require some sort of community of members.
  - colanderman 16y ago
    Indeed, I wonder how different the results would have been had they asked, "do you believe in a deity?" or "are you spiritual?"
    - tokenadult 16y ago
      I can't speak for the other countries, but private polling data in the United States reveals many more people who believe in a deity or who self-describe as "spiritual" than who are affiliated with an organized religious community by regular attendance at group meetings. http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations Christian scholars in the United States have noted that many self-described Christians do not have a set of doctrinal beliefs that accord with historic Christianity. http://www.barna.org/transformation-articles/252-barna-survey-examines-changes-in-worldview-among-christians-over-the-past-13-years http://www.barna.org/transformation-articles/252-barna-surve...
  - bartonfink 16y ago
    I fall more in the philosophical camp than the sociological camp with regards to religion, as I use the term to describe a subject of thought rather than a cultural institution, which is how your sociologists seem to be characterizing it. I'm not sure that your linguistic argument holds in this case, because we're actually discussing the specifics of what "religion" means and so we can't appeal to standard usage. I, for instance, wouldn't call someone's personal beliefs on God a "religion" any more than I would call someone's personal beliefs on mental illness a "psychology" or their views on continental drift a "geography". In my mind, it just doesn't make sense for someone to possess a subject of thought. If religion requires active participation in a community, then the existence of hermits who feel drawn to separate themselves from society to focus more on God seems to be a strong enough counterpoint that there's more going on. Like you say, there's disagreement about the term, but I'm just pointing out that this study only seems to make sense in a purely social way. People in these nine countries aren't going to stop thinking about God, death or any of the other usual subjects of religious materials, so I think calling for the extinction of religion is a bit premature.
synnik 16y ago
Even the great Hari Seldon was unable to accurately turn mathematical models into true predictions of human society without the intervention of R. Daneel Olivaw.
- dalore 16y ago
  No you have the wrong way round. Daneel (all though started with Giskard) was unable to accurately turn mathematical models intro true predications without Hari Seldon.
winestock 16y ago
Religion isn't the only thing becoming extinct in those nations. Go to Wikipedia and search for "Demographics of X" where X is a nation from the list given in the above-linked article: Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Switzerland. (Nation/ Total Fertility Rate) (Australia/ 1.97) (Austria/ 1.41) (Canada/ 1.58) (Czech Republic/ 1.49) (Finland/ 1.85) (Ireland/ 2.1) (Netherlands/ 1.66) (New Zealand/ 2.1) (Switzerland/ 1.46) Those numbers are for the years 2007 to 2009, depending on the nation. Note that only Ireland and New Zealand are at replacement levels. Residual Catholic natalism may explain Ireland's current fertility (given their loss of religion, don't expect that to last). Reading between the lines in the Wikipedia article for New Zealand, it seems that the Maori and Pacific Islanders are doing more than their fair share of baby-making. My guess is that they are more religious than the contracepting whites. Bottom line: Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive. UPDATE: I can't get the formatting right on that table of fertility rates.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  There is no way to make a table on hn :( But in general better education leads to more wealth, more time spend in schools and those who have college degrees are less likely to be religious and they are less likely to have children (the price of kids is low if they can help out on the farm, very high if you have to raise them in a modern society). I don't know a good solution to this, but I suppose the problem with fix it self on way or another.
  - jtheory 16y ago
    Look at fertility in France. It's not because people here are highly religious, for sure. Instead, the government simply put lots of programs into place to support family raising -- high-quality free daycare, long school hours (so both parents can get back to work and mothers don't have to sacrifice careers), hefty tax breaks per child, medical care (for birth & pre/post natal, but also pediatric care). And (a bit more oddly) the medical care a mother gets after giving birth has a heavy focus on getting her back into shape for restarting her sex life -- it's standard to be prescribed a course of physical therapy to retrain the perineums of new mothers for exactly that reason. All of these programs designed to help mothers keep working, etc. are not because at heart the French are feminists; they are not. Sexism is rampant. BUT they want mothers to have babies, so they figured out how to make that happen. The system isn't perfect by a long shot, and it's not always ideal to have the state raise your kids as much as tends to happen here, but it's certainly quite successful: the birth rate is about 2 births per woman and slowly rising.
tjic 16y ago
Public and private religiosity was ramping down in the Roman Empire around 30 AD as well. Beware taking 20 years worth of data points and drawing century long lines from them.
- noarchy 16y ago
  Do you have 20 years of data points from Rome in 30 AD?
  - tjic 16y ago
    We've got several hundreds years of writing, temple records, etc.
    - noarchy 16y ago
      Is that several hundred years of data that can give us information comparable to the census data used in the BBC-cited report?
dsuriano 16y ago
This is the best news I've read all morning.
- j79 16y ago
  Why? Are you an atheist with plans to move to the Czech Republic? Are you a Christian that believes God will smite the Czech Republic down for their disobedience to God?
- kbutler 16y ago
  I'm always amused by evangelistic atheism.
  - mahmud 16y ago
    When I see people doing something harmful to themselves and others, because of religion, I'm tempted to preach the message of Void.
  - Apocryphon 16y ago
    "Militant" or "fundamentalist" atheism are pejorative and wildly inaccurate, but I definitely think "evangelistic" atheism aptly fits the "New Atheist" movement. The precise term is probably "anti-religion", though. Most of the irreligious in these nine nations are probably more apathetic or agnostic than actually atheist, much less evangelistic atheist.
  - pjscott 16y ago
    I'm curious, why is that?
aik 16y ago
I'm not entirely sure about this...what's their timeline? I live in Australia and seeing Australia on the list was a huge surprise.
aj700 16y ago
In 200 years they will say: Irrational and women hating creation memes all died in the 21st Century, and the people became truly civilised.
- equalarrow 16y ago
  Amen to that! :)
- drzaiusapelord 16y ago
  I hope so. I'm seeing strong men and theocracies crumbling the middle east. I'm seeing proud gay men and women demanding basic humans rights in the west. I'm seeing a social acceptance of being non-religious. I'm seeing religious bigots think twice before spewing their hatred in the workplace. I'm seeing young people questioning the faith of their parents. I'm seeing basic science like evolution taught to more and more people everyday. Even while the religious do their best to fight this EVERY STEP OF THE WAY. The casual hatred that religion breeds is at least being challenged. 1st century cosmologies may never collapse,but they're moving more towards the low-information and undereducated types everyday. I'm not sure what the future holds, but the trend looks good.
  - phamilton 16y ago
    I'm also seeing plenty of great citizens and neighbors who live what they believe. I see people drawing strength and happiness from their faith. I see people in the darkest stages of their life escape only after gaining that faith. I see religious organizations helping people to donate their time and effort to improving the world both locally and globally. I see good things coming from religion.
    - drzaiusapelord 16y ago
      Blinders are incredible things. People like you remind me of the average North Korean citizen. Even when presented with proof of Dear Leader's abuses, they will deny it and continue to love him and defend his regime to the death.
- 16y ago
bsandbox 16y ago
I'm unaware of any collection of humans in history that did not practice some form of religion. I suspect that religion will become extinct only when we humans do too.
- a-priori 16y ago
  You're right that religion seems to be a human universal. I believe that every human population ever studied practices it in some form or another. But, what may be declining is not religion per se, but rather monotheism. Zoroastrianism, one of the first monotheistic religions, emerged only in the 2nd century BCE. For the entirety of human history before that, about 200 millennia, humans practiced some form of nature worship, ancestor worship or polytheism. It may be that the age of monotheism is coming to an end, but what comes next is anyone's guess.
  - phamilton 16y ago
    2nd Century BC? What about the Jews? While exact dates are not very well known, Jerusalem was invaded around 600 BC. The dead sea scrolls have been dated back to well before the 2nd Century BC.
    - a-priori 16y ago
      You're right, my mistake. I had it in my head that Zoroastrianism was first, then looked up its origins to get a date, but didn't double-check it. It looks like Judaism pre-dates Zoroastrianism by a couple centuries, and Atenism (emerging in the 14th century BC) preceded both. The argument still stands. We're still talking about 4 millennia of monotheism, preceded by 200 millennia of various other forms of religion.
jojofloor 16y ago
Religion is a burden on society, a social trait from civilizations past, they lacked the vast majority of scientific knowledge we currently embrace, this "evolution" was bound to happen sooner or later. Any rational intelligent being should quite clearly see the fundamental floors of all religions, how they act mearly as placebos at best; but primarily as precursors to wars, hours of wasted time per week on mundane rituals, dark ages, etc.
- rick888 16y ago
  If all religions were gone tomorrow, the burden on society would still be there in another form. There are many people religious about global warming, Linux, the GNU, styles of politics and economics, etc. Even some political figures are followed religiously to a point (where logic and reason are out the door when you try to have a conversation questioning them). Religion isn't all bad. There are people that take it to the extremes, but many of the things in the bible teach you to be a better person. I like Buddhism too. ..and we also can't forget that nobody can really prove either way about an afterlife, if god exists, if someone created our universe or it was always there.
Maci 16y ago
People are realising more and more that it's ones self who is in control and do not need to channel their willpower thru an external entity to make things happen / hope that things will go well. Same thing being that it's modern medical science that extends people's lifetime and cures illness, Education that teaches us evolution, Etc, Etc. Besides, Everything has a beginning and an ending so it's hardly surprising. For everything else there's the dream of "The Empathic Civilisation". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g
trustfundbaby 16y ago
I'm of the opinion that as man understands more about the world and how to actually control it (through science and technology) that his reliance or use for religion will fall. It'd be interesting to see a study on that, because I think uncertainty (about anything) ... is a space in the human psyche that is filled by Religion.
gjm11 16y ago
I looked at the paper (already kindly linked by bartonfink, but here it is again: http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1375 http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1375). I think there's considerably less to it than meets the eye. The authors have a very simple model of the dynamics of religious adherence, which amounts to saying: people convert from one (ir)religious position to another in numbers proportional to some function of (1) the fraction of the population currently adhering to each position and (2) some measure of how attractive each position is. They assume that #2 is constant over time. They choose a particular (reasonably plausible) form for the dependency on #1. They have a couple of free parameters, which they adjust to make their predictions fit reality as well as possible. They plot a few graphs, which show their predictions fitting tolerably well. They observe, quite rightly, that their analysis implies that on not-terribly-long timescales whichever position is more attractive will dominate completely. They fail to observe that since at present neither religion (any, or all collectively) nor irreligion is completely dominant anywhere, the attractivenesses must in fact be varying over time, and that future changes to that parameter make an enormous difference to their model’s predictions. They fail to consider the possibility that their model (even if generally adequate) may break down badly for small-minority positions. (If so, its predictions about extinction of any position could be very wrong.) They fail to consider that differences in personality, experiences, etc., may render (ir)religion differently attractive to different people, which could entirely change their model’s predictions near the edges. (That is, once it starts predicting that either religion or irreligion will go extinct or nearly so. That is, exactly the situation the headline describes.) They do (and frankly this is the only interesting bit) consider the effect of clustering effects: a person’s conversion probability may depend not on the overall popularity of the "old" and "new" positions but on their local popularity: people are affected more by their friends, family, neighbours, colleagues, etc. They find that provided people aren’t completely isolated this doesn’t make a huge difference to the overall prediction of the model. I don't think the paper gives much more reason to anticipate the extinction of religion than we already had. (Opinions vary as to how much that is...)
- radu_floricica 16y ago
  Remember that at some point in history being non-religious was either impossible or very underground. It could be that we're globally passing through a period of transition, from one stable uniformity to another.
tintin 16y ago
"The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation." No religious affiliation does not mean people are becoming non-believers. I hear a lot of people who believe (in whatever) but don't want to be marked as religious.
- phamilton 16y ago
  In many cultures, it's quite a binary thing. Either you believe in religion or you believe in science. They are viewed to be entirely incompatible (which they aren't). People who have a belief in a higher power often feel unwilling to label themselves as believers because they don't want to be discriminated against as ignorant and bigoted.
TamDenholm 16y ago
I've always thought religion would become less and less prevalent. Being non-religious was extremely rare before evolution was discovered and now its growing in popularity since we now know more, i think that trend will continue. Evolution has had about 150 years, religion has had multiple thousands of years. In my opinion its just a matter of time before religious belief becomes a minority everywhere.
- sigzero 16y ago
  What do we know? That one species can evolve into another? Never been remotely proven. That one species can adapt itself to its surrounding. Sure that happens. It doesn't change its species though. "Macro" evolution just doesn't happen nor can it be proven to have happened.
  - mrlase 16y ago
    And you're basing your claims of no evidence on...? I study evolution and genetic variability in populations of a certain algae, and have data from the last 20 years from across the country (not the person who took it 20 years ago though) to say that a population doesn't evolve would be absurd. What about genetic drift? What about species isolation? What about changes in a population that prevent sexual reproduction with the rest of the species? The truth of the matter is, there is a plethora of data supporting evolution.
  - tokenadult 16y ago
    "Macro" evolution just doesn't happen nor can it be proven to have happened. Carefully read all the evidence here http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ and report back to us after you have pondered the cited sources and digested what they say.
  - bermanoid 16y ago
    Even assuming your claims were true, what, are we supposed to accept the religious explanation as more plausible? Because not only has that never been proven, it's a lot harder to swallow in the first place, which means we should expect even more evidence that it's true before we take it seriously. And besides. It's pretty much rock solid that one species can evolve into another, or at least that multiple current species sprang from single earlier species. When you look at genetic data across living things, the signs of a tree-like structure are absolutely fucking unmistakable. Sure, it's not a trivial problem to actually extract the entire tree of life (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics - the difficulty is that we only get to touch DNA from the leaves of the tree, and we have to infer the rest), but the tools biologists use are more than powerful enough to distinguish a set of leaves that likely came from an underlying but hidden tree structure from "leaves" that came about in some other way. I don't know numbers off the top of my head, but IIRC from conversations I've had with bioinformatics folks the confidence levels are extremely high, the only debate is over which particular tree should be inferred from a given set of leaves.
Apocryphon 16y ago
These nations have always been prosperous and secularized- this doesn't exactly sound like startling use. The decline of religion as a social institution in these countries will not forestall the existence of bigotry, irrationality, and folly- those are all inevitable problems of human nature.
rbanffy 16y ago
Thank God! (sorry, couldn't resist)
ranprieur 16y ago
As far as I can tell, they're defining "religious" as people claiming to be religious, and "non-religious" as people claiming no religious affiliation. So they're assuming that everyone means the same thing by the word "religion", and that these people's unspoken definition is a useful concept. Atheists like to talk about the harm done by "religion". But this harm might be done by deeper habits of thinking that will persist in people who identify in surveys as "non-religious".
speleding 16y ago
I wonder which one will be the first to be extinct, IE6 or religion. I wonder if there is a correlation between the two. Questions, questions.
Someone 16y ago
I found it weird that they claim to have used census data from the Netherlands. The last census in the Netherlands was 40 years ago (http://www.volkstellingen.nl/en/ http://www.volkstellingen.nl/en/) I would hope they used other sources (data from the CBS (Central Bureau of Statistics) would be the primary candidate)

86 points by marcog1 16y ago

I find this very interesting, and I hope that they get it peer reviewed somewhere so it's more "official" than arxiv. I don't normally view religion as a social activity, and this analysis seems to hinge on social factors (i.e. it seems to be counting edges instead of nodes). Religion doesn't seem to necessitate multiple people in the same way that language does, so I wonder whether their model might be fundamentally flawed. Looks like my pile of papers to read just got a couple pages higher. The link to download the paper is here if anyone wants it. http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1375 http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1375

_delirium 16y ago
I don't normally view religion as a social activity ... Religion doesn't seem to necessitate multiple people in the same way that language does I believe there's some disagreement over whether religion is characterized as primarily a set of beliefs individuals hold, or primarily a sociological phenomenon. Clearly most religions have a mixture of both, so the disagreement is over which is more important or definitional. I think most sociologists tend to see it as more of a social phenomenon, with the role of shared beliefs being just one kind of social glue. Linguistically, we don't seem to call personal beliefs that one person holds, not shared by anyone else, a "religion"; religions seem to require some sort of community of members.
- colanderman 16y ago
  Indeed, I wonder how different the results would have been had they asked, "do you believe in a deity?" or "are you spiritual?"
  - tokenadult 16y ago
    I can't speak for the other countries, but private polling data in the United States reveals many more people who believe in a deity or who self-describe as "spiritual" than who are affiliated with an organized religious community by regular attendance at group meetings. http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations Christian scholars in the United States have noted that many self-described Christians do not have a set of doctrinal beliefs that accord with historic Christianity. http://www.barna.org/transformation-articles/252-barna-survey-examines-changes-in-worldview-among-christians-over-the-past-13-years http://www.barna.org/transformation-articles/252-barna-surve...
- bartonfink 16y ago
  I fall more in the philosophical camp than the sociological camp with regards to religion, as I use the term to describe a subject of thought rather than a cultural institution, which is how your sociologists seem to be characterizing it. I'm not sure that your linguistic argument holds in this case, because we're actually discussing the specifics of what "religion" means and so we can't appeal to standard usage. I, for instance, wouldn't call someone's personal beliefs on God a "religion" any more than I would call someone's personal beliefs on mental illness a "psychology" or their views on continental drift a "geography". In my mind, it just doesn't make sense for someone to possess a subject of thought. If religion requires active participation in a community, then the existence of hermits who feel drawn to separate themselves from society to focus more on God seems to be a strong enough counterpoint that there's more going on. Like you say, there's disagreement about the term, but I'm just pointing out that this study only seems to make sense in a purely social way. People in these nine countries aren't going to stop thinking about God, death or any of the other usual subjects of religious materials, so I think calling for the extinction of religion is a bit premature.

synnik 16y ago

Even the great Hari Seldon was unable to accurately turn mathematical models into true predictions of human society without the intervention of R. Daneel Olivaw.

dalore 16y ago
No you have the wrong way round. Daneel (all though started with Giskard) was unable to accurately turn mathematical models intro true predications without Hari Seldon.

winestock 16y ago

Religion isn't the only thing becoming extinct in those nations. Go to Wikipedia and search for "Demographics of X" where X is a nation from the list given in the above-linked article: Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Switzerland. (Nation/ Total Fertility Rate) (Australia/ 1.97) (Austria/ 1.41) (Canada/ 1.58) (Czech Republic/ 1.49) (Finland/ 1.85) (Ireland/ 2.1) (Netherlands/ 1.66) (New Zealand/ 2.1) (Switzerland/ 1.46) Those numbers are for the years 2007 to 2009, depending on the nation. Note that only Ireland and New Zealand are at replacement levels. Residual Catholic natalism may explain Ireland's current fertility (given their loss of religion, don't expect that to last). Reading between the lines in the Wikipedia article for New Zealand, it seems that the Maori and Pacific Islanders are doing more than their fair share of baby-making. My guess is that they are more religious than the contracepting whites. Bottom line: Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive. UPDATE: I can't get the formatting right on that table of fertility rates.

tomjen3 16y ago
There is no way to make a table on hn :( But in general better education leads to more wealth, more time spend in schools and those who have college degrees are less likely to be religious and they are less likely to have children (the price of kids is low if they can help out on the farm, very high if you have to raise them in a modern society). I don't know a good solution to this, but I suppose the problem with fix it self on way or another.
- jtheory 16y ago
  Look at fertility in France. It's not because people here are highly religious, for sure. Instead, the government simply put lots of programs into place to support family raising -- high-quality free daycare, long school hours (so both parents can get back to work and mothers don't have to sacrifice careers), hefty tax breaks per child, medical care (for birth & pre/post natal, but also pediatric care). And (a bit more oddly) the medical care a mother gets after giving birth has a heavy focus on getting her back into shape for restarting her sex life -- it's standard to be prescribed a course of physical therapy to retrain the perineums of new mothers for exactly that reason. All of these programs designed to help mothers keep working, etc. are not because at heart the French are feminists; they are not. Sexism is rampant. BUT they want mothers to have babies, so they figured out how to make that happen. The system isn't perfect by a long shot, and it's not always ideal to have the state raise your kids as much as tends to happen here, but it's certainly quite successful: the birth rate is about 2 births per woman and slowly rising.

tjic 16y ago

Public and private religiosity was ramping down in the Roman Empire around 30 AD as well. Beware taking 20 years worth of data points and drawing century long lines from them.

noarchy 16y ago
Do you have 20 years of data points from Rome in 30 AD?
- tjic 16y ago
  We've got several hundreds years of writing, temple records, etc.
  - noarchy 16y ago
    Is that several hundred years of data that can give us information comparable to the census data used in the BBC-cited report?

dsuriano 16y ago

This is the best news I've read all morning.

j79 16y ago
Why? Are you an atheist with plans to move to the Czech Republic? Are you a Christian that believes God will smite the Czech Republic down for their disobedience to God?
kbutler 16y ago
I'm always amused by evangelistic atheism.
- mahmud 16y ago
  When I see people doing something harmful to themselves and others, because of religion, I'm tempted to preach the message of Void.
- Apocryphon 16y ago
  "Militant" or "fundamentalist" atheism are pejorative and wildly inaccurate, but I definitely think "evangelistic" atheism aptly fits the "New Atheist" movement. The precise term is probably "anti-religion", though. Most of the irreligious in these nine nations are probably more apathetic or agnostic than actually atheist, much less evangelistic atheist.
- pjscott 16y ago
  I'm curious, why is that?

aik 16y ago

I'm not entirely sure about this...what's their timeline? I live in Australia and seeing Australia on the list was a huge surprise.

aj700 16y ago

In 200 years they will say: Irrational and women hating creation memes all died in the 21st Century, and the people became truly civilised.

equalarrow 16y ago
Amen to that! :)
drzaiusapelord 16y ago
I hope so. I'm seeing strong men and theocracies crumbling the middle east. I'm seeing proud gay men and women demanding basic humans rights in the west. I'm seeing a social acceptance of being non-religious. I'm seeing religious bigots think twice before spewing their hatred in the workplace. I'm seeing young people questioning the faith of their parents. I'm seeing basic science like evolution taught to more and more people everyday. Even while the religious do their best to fight this EVERY STEP OF THE WAY. The casual hatred that religion breeds is at least being challenged. 1st century cosmologies may never collapse,but they're moving more towards the low-information and undereducated types everyday. I'm not sure what the future holds, but the trend looks good.
- phamilton 16y ago
  I'm also seeing plenty of great citizens and neighbors who live what they believe. I see people drawing strength and happiness from their faith. I see people in the darkest stages of their life escape only after gaining that faith. I see religious organizations helping people to donate their time and effort to improving the world both locally and globally. I see good things coming from religion.
  - drzaiusapelord 16y ago
    Blinders are incredible things. People like you remind me of the average North Korean citizen. Even when presented with proof of Dear Leader's abuses, they will deny it and continue to love him and defend his regime to the death.
16y ago

bsandbox 16y ago

I'm unaware of any collection of humans in history that did not practice some form of religion. I suspect that religion will become extinct only when we humans do too.

a-priori 16y ago
You're right that religion seems to be a human universal. I believe that every human population ever studied practices it in some form or another. But, what may be declining is not religion per se, but rather monotheism. Zoroastrianism, one of the first monotheistic religions, emerged only in the 2nd century BCE. For the entirety of human history before that, about 200 millennia, humans practiced some form of nature worship, ancestor worship or polytheism. It may be that the age of monotheism is coming to an end, but what comes next is anyone's guess.
- phamilton 16y ago
  2nd Century BC? What about the Jews? While exact dates are not very well known, Jerusalem was invaded around 600 BC. The dead sea scrolls have been dated back to well before the 2nd Century BC.
  - a-priori 16y ago
    You're right, my mistake. I had it in my head that Zoroastrianism was first, then looked up its origins to get a date, but didn't double-check it. It looks like Judaism pre-dates Zoroastrianism by a couple centuries, and Atenism (emerging in the 14th century BC) preceded both. The argument still stands. We're still talking about 4 millennia of monotheism, preceded by 200 millennia of various other forms of religion.

jojofloor 16y ago

Religion is a burden on society, a social trait from civilizations past, they lacked the vast majority of scientific knowledge we currently embrace, this "evolution" was bound to happen sooner or later. Any rational intelligent being should quite clearly see the fundamental floors of all religions, how they act mearly as placebos at best; but primarily as precursors to wars, hours of wasted time per week on mundane rituals, dark ages, etc.

rick888 16y ago
If all religions were gone tomorrow, the burden on society would still be there in another form. There are many people religious about global warming, Linux, the GNU, styles of politics and economics, etc. Even some political figures are followed religiously to a point (where logic and reason are out the door when you try to have a conversation questioning them). Religion isn't all bad. There are people that take it to the extremes, but many of the things in the bible teach you to be a better person. I like Buddhism too. ..and we also can't forget that nobody can really prove either way about an afterlife, if god exists, if someone created our universe or it was always there.

Maci 16y ago

People are realising more and more that it's ones self who is in control and do not need to channel their willpower thru an external entity to make things happen / hope that things will go well. Same thing being that it's modern medical science that extends people's lifetime and cures illness, Education that teaches us evolution, Etc, Etc. Besides, Everything has a beginning and an ending so it's hardly surprising. For everything else there's the dream of "The Empathic Civilisation". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g

trustfundbaby 16y ago

I'm of the opinion that as man understands more about the world and how to actually control it (through science and technology) that his reliance or use for religion will fall. It'd be interesting to see a study on that, because I think uncertainty (about anything) ... is a space in the human psyche that is filled by Religion.

gjm11 16y ago

I looked at the paper (already kindly linked by bartonfink, but here it is again: http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1375 http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1375). I think there's considerably less to it than meets the eye. The authors have a very simple model of the dynamics of religious adherence, which amounts to saying: people convert from one (ir)religious position to another in numbers proportional to some function of (1) the fraction of the population currently adhering to each position and (2) some measure of how attractive each position is. They assume that #2 is constant over time. They choose a particular (reasonably plausible) form for the dependency on #1. They have a couple of free parameters, which they adjust to make their predictions fit reality as well as possible. They plot a few graphs, which show their predictions fitting tolerably well. They observe, quite rightly, that their analysis implies that on not-terribly-long timescales whichever position is more attractive will dominate completely. They fail to observe that since at present neither religion (any, or all collectively) nor irreligion is completely dominant anywhere, the attractivenesses must in fact be varying over time, and that future changes to that parameter make an enormous difference to their model’s predictions. They fail to consider the possibility that their model (even if generally adequate) may break down badly for small-minority positions. (If so, its predictions about extinction of any position could be very wrong.) They fail to consider that differences in personality, experiences, etc., may render (ir)religion differently attractive to different people, which could entirely change their model’s predictions near the edges. (That is, once it starts predicting that either religion or irreligion will go extinct or nearly so. That is, exactly the situation the headline describes.) They do (and frankly this is the only interesting bit) consider the effect of clustering effects: a person’s conversion probability may depend not on the overall popularity of the "old" and "new" positions but on their local popularity: people are affected more by their friends, family, neighbours, colleagues, etc. They find that provided people aren’t completely isolated this doesn’t make a huge difference to the overall prediction of the model. I don't think the paper gives much more reason to anticipate the extinction of religion than we already had. (Opinions vary as to how much that is...)

radu_floricica 16y ago
Remember that at some point in history being non-religious was either impossible or very underground. It could be that we're globally passing through a period of transition, from one stable uniformity to another.

tintin 16y ago

"The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation." No religious affiliation does not mean people are becoming non-believers. I hear a lot of people who believe (in whatever) but don't want to be marked as religious.

phamilton 16y ago
In many cultures, it's quite a binary thing. Either you believe in religion or you believe in science. They are viewed to be entirely incompatible (which they aren't). People who have a belief in a higher power often feel unwilling to label themselves as believers because they don't want to be discriminated against as ignorant and bigoted.

TamDenholm 16y ago

I've always thought religion would become less and less prevalent. Being non-religious was extremely rare before evolution was discovered and now its growing in popularity since we now know more, i think that trend will continue. Evolution has had about 150 years, religion has had multiple thousands of years. In my opinion its just a matter of time before religious belief becomes a minority everywhere.

sigzero 16y ago
What do we know? That one species can evolve into another? Never been remotely proven. That one species can adapt itself to its surrounding. Sure that happens. It doesn't change its species though. "Macro" evolution just doesn't happen nor can it be proven to have happened.
- mrlase 16y ago
  And you're basing your claims of no evidence on...? I study evolution and genetic variability in populations of a certain algae, and have data from the last 20 years from across the country (not the person who took it 20 years ago though) to say that a population doesn't evolve would be absurd. What about genetic drift? What about species isolation? What about changes in a population that prevent sexual reproduction with the rest of the species? The truth of the matter is, there is a plethora of data supporting evolution.
- tokenadult 16y ago
  "Macro" evolution just doesn't happen nor can it be proven to have happened. Carefully read all the evidence here http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ and report back to us after you have pondered the cited sources and digested what they say.
- bermanoid 16y ago
  Even assuming your claims were true, what, are we supposed to accept the religious explanation as more plausible? Because not only has that never been proven, it's a lot harder to swallow in the first place, which means we should expect even more evidence that it's true before we take it seriously. And besides. It's pretty much rock solid that one species can evolve into another, or at least that multiple current species sprang from single earlier species. When you look at genetic data across living things, the signs of a tree-like structure are absolutely fucking unmistakable. Sure, it's not a trivial problem to actually extract the entire tree of life (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics - the difficulty is that we only get to touch DNA from the leaves of the tree, and we have to infer the rest), but the tools biologists use are more than powerful enough to distinguish a set of leaves that likely came from an underlying but hidden tree structure from "leaves" that came about in some other way. I don't know numbers off the top of my head, but IIRC from conversations I've had with bioinformatics folks the confidence levels are extremely high, the only debate is over which particular tree should be inferred from a given set of leaves.

Apocryphon 16y ago

These nations have always been prosperous and secularized- this doesn't exactly sound like startling use. The decline of religion as a social institution in these countries will not forestall the existence of bigotry, irrationality, and folly- those are all inevitable problems of human nature.

rbanffy 16y ago

Thank God! (sorry, couldn't resist)

ranprieur 16y ago

As far as I can tell, they're defining "religious" as people claiming to be religious, and "non-religious" as people claiming no religious affiliation. So they're assuming that everyone means the same thing by the word "religion", and that these people's unspoken definition is a useful concept. Atheists like to talk about the harm done by "religion". But this harm might be done by deeper habits of thinking that will persist in people who identify in surveys as "non-religious".

speleding 16y ago

I wonder which one will be the first to be extinct, IE6 or religion. I wonder if there is a correlation between the two. Questions, questions.

Someone 16y ago

I found it weird that they claim to have used census data from the Netherlands. The last census in the Netherlands was 40 years ago (http://www.volkstellingen.nl/en/ http://www.volkstellingen.nl/en/) I would hope they used other sources (data from the CBS (Central Bureau of Statistics) would be the primary candidate)