4 ms·

It's not the most relevant. The enlightenment spread secularity. Books spread secularity. Childless hermits can write those. Come to think of it, religions spre

It's not the most relevant. The enlightenment spread secularity. Books spread secularity. Childless hermits can write those. Come to think of it, religions spread through childless hermits writing books, too.

somenameforme 1y ago
Yes, it literally is, and this isn't ambiguous. You can find a zillion studies contrasting the religion of people to those of their parents. For instance here [1] is an overview from Pew. 84% of adults who were raised in e.g. a completely Protestant home are Protestants themselves. That strong of a correlation simply doesn't leave room anything else to significantly matter. If you then isolate that sample to situations where both parents were Protestant and also talked about religion a alot, 89% of their children ended up as Protestant! For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%. [1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-between-childhood-religious-upbringing-and-current-religious-identity/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-betwee...
- exe34 1y ago
  any idea how secularism started at all? by your logic, it should have been snuffed out before we even knew about it.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    Largely by a mixture of hypocrisy and commercialism. Catholicism has struggled mightily with this issue throughout its history, and is a big part of the reason that Protestantism even exists today. Get it, "Protest"ant? When people claim to hold values, and then act in apparent contradiction of those same values, it doesn't exactly inspire one to themselves adopt those values. And that's been a major player, especially in the West, for the past ~70 years where you have politicians wearing religion on the coat of their sleeve, and then going and killing hundreds of thousands of people over what is overtly about oil, economics, and geopolitics - lofty moralistic rhetoric notwithstanding. Then you have things like the pedophilia scandals high within the Catholic hierarchy, made even worse by coverups. This is probably why religions like fundamental Islam, Haredi Judaism, and so on are even more heritable. Those who follow such religions tend to very much live their proclaimed values. For instance I really don't agree with people like Khabib Nurmagomedov on many of his values, yet he lives those values, even when they hurt him in the short-run, and I find it very inspirational. I can only imagine how young (or older for that matter) Muslims see him. Integrity in life is just so important.
    - exe34 1y ago
      is secularism a result of hypocrisy in the flock in this scenario?
      - somenameforme 1y ago
        Definitely, our children do not learn so much from our words as much as from our behaviors and actions. Religious individuals like to claim that the decline in religiosity drove a decline of morality in society. I think it's rather the opposite - that a decline of morality in society drove a decline in religiosity. It's like a parent trying to teach their child about healthy eating while they down cokes, chips, and sweets every day. That kid is going to be much more likely to, himself, end up downing cokes, chips, and sweets than he is to eat healthy. And for his own kids, he may not even bother with the pretext of healthy eating.
        exe34 1y ago
        I like how you try to link lack of religiosity and lack of morality. it shows you understand neither.
        somenameforme 1y ago
        Morality is relative. But from my worldview the perpetuation of a culture, and a society, is the first and foremost requirement of any successful culture or society, and arguably the single most primal responsibility of the people within that culture and society. This overlaps well with religion, but not so much with what I assume you might consider moral or amoral given your comment.
        exe34 1y ago
        yes, this is why the Catholic church protects abusers. propagation of the memeplex comes above the people it pretends to save.
        1y ago
- card_zero 1y ago
  Effects have mechanisms. Not everything works by correlation. In fact nothing really works by correlation. Things work by causes. Indoctrination, that's pretty effective, but so are heresy and sedition, and revolutions in thought, and sea-changes. Pew probably isn't monitoring those.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    People leaving some faith would obviously be the inverse of those who stay with it. So for Protestantism, it'd be 16%, or 11% for highly religious households. In deciding to look up the numbers for Islam, it's somewhat unsurprisingly only 1%. [1] --- "Based on survey data collected in 117 countries and territories from 2008 to 2024, we estimate that about 1% of people who are raised Muslim leave the faith. This loss is offset by a comparable influx of people joining Islam." --- Wiki has a nice table on Islam in particular here. [2] They broke 10% of the world population sometime around 1820. They broke 20% 170 years later, around 1990. And they're expected to to break 30% about 60 years after that, by 2050. We're trending towards a majority Muslim world, simply because of fertility, all the while people not having children somehow think people in the future will somehow share their values. [1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/10/islam-was-the-worlds-fastest-growing-religion-from-2010-to-2020/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/10/islam-was... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth#Historical_Muslim_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth#Histo...
    - shkkmo 1y ago
      Not really, if you look at the actual birth rates, it maps to economic success more than religious identity. Yes, we all know that global population growth is mainly happening in Africa and other poor countries. You also cite global retention rates for islam. Those retention rates are memetic and highly dependent on the same set of poorer, non-western countries so you are comparing applyes to oranges. If you look at western countries, the retention rate is pretty similar. You keep stretching statistics to reinforce your world view without trying to actually understand the statistics, which is why I assume you keep repeating garbage like "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely."
- shkkmo 1y ago
  Your understanding of the statistics is lacking. A 84% reproductive cultural "replacement rate" means that in order to maintain the population protestants need to have an average of 2.38 (2/0.84) kids to have the same number of protestants in the next generation. The real number is actually much higher than that because what you really need is to measure how many children of two protestants also marry a protestant. This percentage is lower than (pew estimates this as 75%) so now you need to have have an average of 3.17 (2/(.83*.75) kids just to maintain the protestant population. These are, of course, woefully inaccurate numbers and exclude all kinds of factors. The reason I present them isn't to try to estimate what the numbers are but to make it clear that "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely" is not simply not anywhere near true. You just can't accurately estimate the growth rate of a cultural identity by looking at the birth rate. > For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%. That's not what the science says. The rates of transmission are only slightly higher and definitely don't approach 100%. These transmission rates also aren't "natural laws" but contigent effects that are driven by any of a number of different cultural, religious, economic and legal factors. Even if a minority cultural identity does manage to grow through reproductive practices, it can still be fragmented by schisms (especially common with religious identity) or out competed by memetically superior identities that pulls converters from a wide range of cultural identities. Your view is here is incredibly simplistic and ignores all kinds of basic evidence from throughout history.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    I'm enjoying these conversations but kind of having really similar conversations in a number of different threads - so let me link to this [1] as a response, and would prefer if we could continue there. One of the few times I miss the old school non-threaded forums! Anyhow, that link gets into the exact rate of transfer for Islam, the consequent growth over time, and so on. I think you'll be surprised! [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44959480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44959480
exe34 1y ago
or indeed men in robes frothing at the mouth about men in dresses.

somenameforme 1y ago

Yes, it literally is, and this isn't ambiguous. You can find a zillion studies contrasting the religion of people to those of their parents. For instance here [1] is an overview from Pew. 84% of adults who were raised in e.g. a completely Protestant home are Protestants themselves. That strong of a correlation simply doesn't leave room anything else to significantly matter. If you then isolate that sample to situations where both parents were Protestant and also talked about religion a alot, 89% of their children ended up as Protestant! For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%. [1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-between-childhood-religious-upbringing-and-current-religious-identity/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-betwee...

exe34 1y ago
any idea how secularism started at all? by your logic, it should have been snuffed out before we even knew about it.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  Largely by a mixture of hypocrisy and commercialism. Catholicism has struggled mightily with this issue throughout its history, and is a big part of the reason that Protestantism even exists today. Get it, "Protest"ant? When people claim to hold values, and then act in apparent contradiction of those same values, it doesn't exactly inspire one to themselves adopt those values. And that's been a major player, especially in the West, for the past ~70 years where you have politicians wearing religion on the coat of their sleeve, and then going and killing hundreds of thousands of people over what is overtly about oil, economics, and geopolitics - lofty moralistic rhetoric notwithstanding. Then you have things like the pedophilia scandals high within the Catholic hierarchy, made even worse by coverups. This is probably why religions like fundamental Islam, Haredi Judaism, and so on are even more heritable. Those who follow such religions tend to very much live their proclaimed values. For instance I really don't agree with people like Khabib Nurmagomedov on many of his values, yet he lives those values, even when they hurt him in the short-run, and I find it very inspirational. I can only imagine how young (or older for that matter) Muslims see him. Integrity in life is just so important.
  - exe34 1y ago
    is secularism a result of hypocrisy in the flock in this scenario?
    - somenameforme 1y ago
      Definitely, our children do not learn so much from our words as much as from our behaviors and actions. Religious individuals like to claim that the decline in religiosity drove a decline of morality in society. I think it's rather the opposite - that a decline of morality in society drove a decline in religiosity. It's like a parent trying to teach their child about healthy eating while they down cokes, chips, and sweets every day. That kid is going to be much more likely to, himself, end up downing cokes, chips, and sweets than he is to eat healthy. And for his own kids, he may not even bother with the pretext of healthy eating.
      - exe34 1y ago
        I like how you try to link lack of religiosity and lack of morality. it shows you understand neither.
        somenameforme 1y ago
        Morality is relative. But from my worldview the perpetuation of a culture, and a society, is the first and foremost requirement of any successful culture or society, and arguably the single most primal responsibility of the people within that culture and society. This overlaps well with religion, but not so much with what I assume you might consider moral or amoral given your comment.
        exe34 1y ago
        yes, this is why the Catholic church protects abusers. propagation of the memeplex comes above the people it pretends to save.
        1y ago
card_zero 1y ago
Effects have mechanisms. Not everything works by correlation. In fact nothing really works by correlation. Things work by causes. Indoctrination, that's pretty effective, but so are heresy and sedition, and revolutions in thought, and sea-changes. Pew probably isn't monitoring those.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  People leaving some faith would obviously be the inverse of those who stay with it. So for Protestantism, it'd be 16%, or 11% for highly religious households. In deciding to look up the numbers for Islam, it's somewhat unsurprisingly only 1%. [1] --- "Based on survey data collected in 117 countries and territories from 2008 to 2024, we estimate that about 1% of people who are raised Muslim leave the faith. This loss is offset by a comparable influx of people joining Islam." --- Wiki has a nice table on Islam in particular here. [2] They broke 10% of the world population sometime around 1820. They broke 20% 170 years later, around 1990. And they're expected to to break 30% about 60 years after that, by 2050. We're trending towards a majority Muslim world, simply because of fertility, all the while people not having children somehow think people in the future will somehow share their values. [1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/10/islam-was-the-worlds-fastest-growing-religion-from-2010-to-2020/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/10/islam-was... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth#Historical_Muslim_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth#Histo...
  - shkkmo 1y ago
    Not really, if you look at the actual birth rates, it maps to economic success more than religious identity. Yes, we all know that global population growth is mainly happening in Africa and other poor countries. You also cite global retention rates for islam. Those retention rates are memetic and highly dependent on the same set of poorer, non-western countries so you are comparing applyes to oranges. If you look at western countries, the retention rate is pretty similar. You keep stretching statistics to reinforce your world view without trying to actually understand the statistics, which is why I assume you keep repeating garbage like "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely."
shkkmo 1y ago
Your understanding of the statistics is lacking. A 84% reproductive cultural "replacement rate" means that in order to maintain the population protestants need to have an average of 2.38 (2/0.84) kids to have the same number of protestants in the next generation. The real number is actually much higher than that because what you really need is to measure how many children of two protestants also marry a protestant. This percentage is lower than (pew estimates this as 75%) so now you need to have have an average of 3.17 (2/(.83*.75) kids just to maintain the protestant population. These are, of course, woefully inaccurate numbers and exclude all kinds of factors. The reason I present them isn't to try to estimate what the numbers are but to make it clear that "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely" is not simply not anywhere near true. You just can't accurately estimate the growth rate of a cultural identity by looking at the birth rate. > For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%. That's not what the science says. The rates of transmission are only slightly higher and definitely don't approach 100%. These transmission rates also aren't "natural laws" but contigent effects that are driven by any of a number of different cultural, religious, economic and legal factors. Even if a minority cultural identity does manage to grow through reproductive practices, it can still be fragmented by schisms (especially common with religious identity) or out competed by memetically superior identities that pulls converters from a wide range of cultural identities. Your view is here is incredibly simplistic and ignores all kinds of basic evidence from throughout history.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  I'm enjoying these conversations but kind of having really similar conversations in a number of different threads - so let me link to this [1] as a response, and would prefer if we could continue there. One of the few times I miss the old school non-threaded forums! Anyhow, that link gets into the exact rate of transfer for Islam, the consequent growth over time, and so on. I think you'll be surprised! [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44959480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44959480

exe34 1y ago

or indeed men in robes frothing at the mouth about men in dresses.