5 ms·

> In the west, increase in secularity has only affected the groups of people who would've been nominally religious (i.e. religious in name only). People who att

by mlyle 3y ago

> In the west, increase in secularity has only affected the groups of people who would've been nominally religious (i.e. religious in name only). People who attend religious services on a weekly basis (a much better measure of religiosity) has stayed consistent. False: It was 50% in the US 70 years ago. It's about 30% now. This is a decline of 20% in absolute terms, or a 40% decline in relative terms. Weekly church attendance is under 15% in basically all of Western Europe -- https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/how-religious-commitment-varies-by-country-among-people-of-all-ages/pf-06-13-18_religiouscommitment-03-08/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/how-religiou... (note that this show US attendance at 36%, but it's also comprised of data 6-15 years old). It's probably lower than this-- research indicates that people overstate their church attendance in surveys; https://www.religion-online.org/article/did-you-really-go-to-church-this-week-behind-the-poll-data/ https://www.religion-online.org/article/did-you-really-go-to... > The fact you can't see value in religious systems adhered to by billions of people over thousands of years speaks less to those systems than your lack of understanding them. Plenty of things were done by huge fractions of the world population for thousands of years that deserve questioning. Authoritarianism; oppression of minorities and women; routine warfare with neighboring groups; belief in witch doctors; pooping near water wells, etc. This line of argument isn't a very good one.

chmod775 3y ago
> https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/how-religious-commitment-varies-by-country-among-people-of-all-ages/pf-06-13-18_religiouscommitment-03-08/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/how-religiou... 10% of Germans claim to go to church every week? I've got friends, relatives, and acquaintances all over the country and of all age groups, and I don't know a single person who would even remotely qualify. That's at least a hundred people. Plugging that into the PMF of the binomial distribution gives me a likelihood so minuscule I should consider buying a lottery ticket. I call bullshit. That research is bunk. Even the churches themselves claim their weekly attendance is only about 3,300k (catholic church, 2017[1]) + 770k (evangelical churches, 2019[2]) - that doesn't yet mean the same attendees every week. I still don't trust these numbers, but that's already less than half the above research, making their self-reported attendance numbers essentially worthless. [1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gottesdienste-laaaangweilig-100.html https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gottesdienste-laaaangweilig-1... [2] https://www.ekhn.de/aktuell/detailmagazin/news/studie-ueber-gottesdienstbesuch-vorgelegt.html https://www.ekhn.de/aktuell/detailmagazin/news/studie-ueber-...
- mlyle 3y ago
  I'm not sure if you're trying to argue with me or enhance my point. If it's the former, note I said: "It's probably lower than this-- research indicates that people overstate their church attendance in surveys" and also pointed out the data is somewhat old.
  - chmod775 3y ago
    > I'm not sure if you're trying to argue with me or enhance my point. My intent is neither. It's merely tangential.
- hnaccount_rng 3y ago
  That really says more about your social circle than anything else. Your assumption of statistical representativeness is (quite naturally) completely off. Depending on which part of my social circle one would talk about 10% would have been far too few.. At least a couple of years back. It’s getting better though ;)
  - chmod775 3y ago
    > Depending on which part of my social circle one would talk about 10% would have been far too few. Depending on which part of the pizza you take, it's not going to have any pepperoni. In other words, if you intentionally take a non-representative sample, unsurprisingly your sample is not going to be representative. I don't really see the point you're trying to make. 10% of Germans cannot be weekly churchgoers when there's at most ~4 million weekly attendees overall. It's obviously impossible. A number lower than 5%, preferably ~1-2%, I can easily square away with that number and my own, not intentionally cherry-picked, sample.
    - hnaccount_rng 3y ago
      If I hadn’t gone to study in a reasonably sized city, my only social circle would have far beyond 10% weekly churchgoers (I’d guess roughly half). My point is: you seem to have grown up in a very church-removed part of the country (if I had to guess either big city or east Germany). That is where your biased sample comes from. It’s most certainly not representative, and if you claim it to be just because you don’t sub select, then you are at best ignorant and at worst intentionally dishonest ;)
skissane 3y ago
I think the future of religion in the West – and eventually probably much of the rest of the world as well – is countercultural (ultra-)conservatives such as ultra-Orthodox Jews (Hasidim and Haredim), the Amish, conservative Roman Catholic groups such as traditionalists (SSPX/etc) and Opus Dei, Quiverfull Protestants, Salafist Muslims, etc. Many of those groups (1) have high birth rates (large families starting at a young age), (2) have high retention rates (>80%, sometimes even >90%) generation after generation. There is no good reason to suppose that (1) or (2) are going to stop any time soon, and even they do for some of them, they are unlikely to do so for all. I don't think we should expect these groups to follow the same secularising trajectory as mainstream religion. These groups have evolved a cultural immunity to the temptation of defecting to secular modernity which the religious mainstream failed to evolve.

by mlyle 3y ago

chmod775 3y ago

> https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/how-religious-commitment-varies-by-country-among-people-of-all-ages/pf-06-13-18_religiouscommitment-03-08/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/how-religiou... 10% of Germans claim to go to church every week? I've got friends, relatives, and acquaintances all over the country and of all age groups, and I don't know a single person who would even remotely qualify. That's at least a hundred people. Plugging that into the PMF of the binomial distribution gives me a likelihood so minuscule I should consider buying a lottery ticket. I call bullshit. That research is bunk. Even the churches themselves claim their weekly attendance is only about 3,300k (catholic church, 2017[1]) + 770k (evangelical churches, 2019[2]) - that doesn't yet mean the same attendees every week. I still don't trust these numbers, but that's already less than half the above research, making their self-reported attendance numbers essentially worthless. [1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gottesdienste-laaaangweilig-100.html https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gottesdienste-laaaangweilig-1... [2] https://www.ekhn.de/aktuell/detailmagazin/news/studie-ueber-gottesdienstbesuch-vorgelegt.html https://www.ekhn.de/aktuell/detailmagazin/news/studie-ueber-...

mlyle 3y ago
I'm not sure if you're trying to argue with me or enhance my point. If it's the former, note I said: "It's probably lower than this-- research indicates that people overstate their church attendance in surveys" and also pointed out the data is somewhat old.
- chmod775 3y ago
  > I'm not sure if you're trying to argue with me or enhance my point. My intent is neither. It's merely tangential.
hnaccount_rng 3y ago
That really says more about your social circle than anything else. Your assumption of statistical representativeness is (quite naturally) completely off. Depending on which part of my social circle one would talk about 10% would have been far too few.. At least a couple of years back. It’s getting better though ;)
- chmod775 3y ago
  > Depending on which part of my social circle one would talk about 10% would have been far too few. Depending on which part of the pizza you take, it's not going to have any pepperoni. In other words, if you intentionally take a non-representative sample, unsurprisingly your sample is not going to be representative. I don't really see the point you're trying to make. 10% of Germans cannot be weekly churchgoers when there's at most ~4 million weekly attendees overall. It's obviously impossible. A number lower than 5%, preferably ~1-2%, I can easily square away with that number and my own, not intentionally cherry-picked, sample.
  - hnaccount_rng 3y ago
    If I hadn’t gone to study in a reasonably sized city, my only social circle would have far beyond 10% weekly churchgoers (I’d guess roughly half). My point is: you seem to have grown up in a very church-removed part of the country (if I had to guess either big city or east Germany). That is where your biased sample comes from. It’s most certainly not representative, and if you claim it to be just because you don’t sub select, then you are at best ignorant and at worst intentionally dishonest ;)

skissane 3y ago

I think the future of religion in the West – and eventually probably much of the rest of the world as well – is countercultural (ultra-)conservatives such as ultra-Orthodox Jews (Hasidim and Haredim), the Amish, conservative Roman Catholic groups such as traditionalists (SSPX/etc) and Opus Dei, Quiverfull Protestants, Salafist Muslims, etc. Many of those groups (1) have high birth rates (large families starting at a young age), (2) have high retention rates (>80%, sometimes even >90%) generation after generation. There is no good reason to suppose that (1) or (2) are going to stop any time soon, and even they do for some of them, they are unlikely to do so for all. I don't think we should expect these groups to follow the same secularising trajectory as mainstream religion. These groups have evolved a cultural immunity to the temptation of defecting to secular modernity which the religious mainstream failed to evolve.