Why atheism will replace religion.

[redqueen]

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201005/why-atheism-will-replace-religion

Why atheism grows faster than religion
Published on May 18, 2010

Atheists are heavily concentrated in economically developed countries, particularly the social democracies of Europe. In underdeveloped countries, there are virtually no atheists. Atheism is thus a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Why do modern conditions produce atheism?

First, as to the distribution of atheism in the world, a clear pattern can be discerned. In sub-Saharan Africa there is almost no atheism (Zuckerman, 2007). Belief in God declines in more developed countries and is concentrated in Europe in countries such as Sweden (64% nonbelievers), Denmark (48%), France (44%) and Germany (42%). In contrast, the incidence of atheism in most sub-Saharan countries is below 1%.

The question of why economically developed countries turn to atheism has been batted around by anthropologists for about eighty years. Anthropologist James Fraser proposed that scientific prediction and control of nature supplants religion as a means of controlling uncertainty in our lives. This hunch is supported by data showing that the more educated countries have higher levels of non belief and there are strong correlations between atheism and intelligence (see my earlier post on this).

Atheists are more likely to be college-educated people who live in cities and they are highly concentrated in the social democracies of Europe. Atheism thus blossoms amid affluence where most people feel economically secure. But why?

more at link

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Ignorance and poverty are fertile ground for religion.

[Speck Tater]

2. God is laughing at these studies.

Because It doesn't really care whether anyone believes in It or not. It's not like It is some kind of attention-starved narcissist like the Christians portray It.

[redqueen]

3. ...

it's not just Christians that portray it that way... but no matter.

[roguevalley]

14. agreed.

[darkstar3]

16. If IT is such an IT and not an him/her, how does IT laugh? n/t

[DeSwiss]

19. How does god sound when IT laughs???

- Does he giggle like a little girl? Or is it a rich full-throated laugh, where his belly bounces up and down like a bowl full of jelly???

[Speck Tater]

22. Think of that little laughing Buddha statue.

It turns into Laughing Buddha every time It wants to laugh.

[darkstar3]

26. And does it turn into a bearded old man when it wants its nose to burn? n/t

[uberllama42]

28. When it wants to have sex with a nine-year-old girl, does it turn into Muhammad? n/t

[darkstar3]

29. See, now how am I supposed to follow that?

Good one. :)

[BurtWorm]

35. IT turns into a Catholic priest

[darkstar3]

37. Wrong gender. n/t

[iris27]

49. Sadly, not really.

Not to kill the snark or anything. :) But there are actually probably more girl-children raped by molesting priests than boy-children...society just gets in more of an uproar over the boys.

[darkstar3]

50. And isn't THAT telling of our good-ole-fashioned American Values? n/t

[Heywood J]

39. Like this.

[Christa]

51. I wonder if IT farts? nt

[dmallind]

52. Very much so. It's in the bible

And the sounding of his bowels was like harpers harping or some such.

[uberllama42]

27. How do you know this?

You seem rather sure of it, as indicated by your use of boldface for emphasis. And yet what evidence is there for your assertion?

[Speck Tater]

45. I have very strict standards for what I choose to believe in.

If it's fun to believe, then I believe it.
If it's boring and conventional, then I don't believe it.

I'm not always right, but I'm always having fun!

[uberllama42]

46. Well, I suppose that's useful, in a very limited sense

I would emphasize what you said about not always being right, though. That's where you and I differ. I'm more apt to worry about whether I'm right or not.

[tavalon]

32. I don't think the god of which you speak care much about our studies

[jdp349]

34. meaningless speculation is meaningless

[flakey_foont]

4. Aye

someday the human race will emerge from it's shell of ignorance ...and maybe accept responsibility for their own lives instead of depending on superstition and invisible magical parent figures

[ladjf]

11. That would be a wonderful time. I'm sorry that I won't be there.

[pokerfan]

17. Bertrand Russell said it best I think

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the
unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother
who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole
thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty,
and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because
fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to
understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way
step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the
opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in
which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our
own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to
invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this
world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these
centuries have made it.

We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good
facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of
it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the
terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the
ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you
hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that the y are miserable sinners,
and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self- respecting human
beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make
the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be
better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs
knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past
or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It
needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking
back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the
future that our intelligence can create.

[rug]

5. I'll hold my breath.

[JBoy]

6. I can buy the link between atheism and education,

but not between atheism and intelligence. The "earlier post" by the author says "more intelligent countries have more atheists".

Intelligence is independent of education, so I challenge the notion that you can rank the "intelligence" of countries.

[dmallind]

8. I'm sure any response would simply cause weaselling

of "well THAT doesn't mention intelligence either!" but IQ, higher degrees in the hard sciences and wealth are also positively correlated with atheism.

[gcomeau]

21. Read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence

Enjoy. If you're in a hurry, skip down to the "Studies comparing religious belief and I.Q." section.

[dmallind]

7. ...trouble is that pesky outlier....us. NT

[callous taoboy]

9. Religious extremeism has done a lot of damage at my place of work,

has caused people new to the job (and who are also hyped up on god) to feel uncertain about me because the super-xtians have warned them that I am not a believer.

[redqueen]

10. That is so sad.

[unblock]

12. if an increase in atheism depends on an increase in intelligence, then atheism is doomed.

[blueworld]

13. I think it's funny linking either atheism or religion to God; they're human. n/t

[roguevalley]

15. ditto, darling blueworld. you have it spot on for me.

[struggle4progress]

18. Back-to-back World Wars effectively smashed the conventional pieties of Europe

[ChadwickHenryWard]

24. Do you think it was the wars themselves

or the postwar development (as the study would seem to suggest) that resulted in the decline of religious observance? (Or both?)

[struggle4progress]

30. I think it was the Wars themselves. Western civilization, such as it was,

had a smashingly high opinion of itself in the late 19th and very early 20th century: it dominated the world, militarily and economically and in every scientific sense. Westerners in the period (say) between 1890 and 1910 saw enormous progress -- though they exploited much of the rest of the world to obtain that progress. And yet they fell in 1914 into a completely pointless and extremely violent conflict that completely wiped away (for example) an entire generation of young Frenchmen. Germany -- which had been the proud scientific center of Europe -- had barely raised up a crop of new soldiers before the militarists were marching again under banners of hate. Perhaps 100 million people vanished in those conflicts. Not only the physical ruin was quite complete; the psychological ruin was complete as well

I came of age during the Vietnam War; one day, I woke up and all of my certainty about absolutely everything was completely gone. But the world I had grown up in was still all there. I think many of the survivors of the World Wars had similar "awaking" experiences, coupled with real visions of devastation and inhumanity. By 1945, what could remain of the naive Victorian era optimism that ushered in the century? The idols toppled, and idols erected upon their wreckage toppled likewise

[trotsky]

33. Interesting how you contradict yourself.

You seem to put down Europe & Western civilization for being too science-dependent. As if they were worshiping science as an idol.

Then you say their idols were toppled by the wars, but it wasn't science that was toppled - it was religion. Science thrived.

[DeSwiss]

20. K&R

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps">god of the gaps gets smaller and smaller as intelligence grows.

[Silent3]

23. "Replace" is a strange word to use in this context.

Atheism isn't a replacement for religion, it's just a lack of it. To get really technical about it, atheism is just a lack of belief in deities. It's at least conceivable (I'm not aware of any real-life examples) for an atheist to believe in a godless variety of supernaturalism and to build a religion around that.

That said, I have a hard time imagining the kind of cultural shift it would take to turn atheists into a world majority. The most atheist country in the world right now (according to the stats in the OP) is Sweden at 64%, but no other country mentioned goes over 50%. Even if the pattern we see -- that increased education, safety, health and economic security generally lead to less religion -- is a pattern that would generally hold true, I wouldn't feel confident in predicting that all of those things will only increase in the future.

[charlie]

31. That's true

Religion "withering" would probably be more accurate. And preferable. Words like "replace" are batsignals for crews who splatter !!STALIN!! all over threads.

[BurtWorm]

36. If atheism becomes a successful strategy for survival, it will replace religiosity.

The universe remains an amazingly dangerous and unpredictable, unfathomable place for most people, which is why religion is so predominant. The less protected people feel from its apparent bloodthirstiness--actually just its plain indifference to human suffering--the more religiosity you find. I don't see those elements leaving the picture any time soon.

[darkstar3]

38. You are mistaking survival and a false sense of security.

Your topic sentence mentions survival, but the body of your post clearly speaks of a false sense of security provided by religion and lacking elsewhere.

We all have to outgrow our security blankets sometime.

[BurtWorm]

40. I mean that atheism, following Darwin, would have to prove more successful a survival strategy than

religiosity if it were to prevail among humans. I didn't make the link between that thought and my pessimistic assessment of humanity's capacity for atheism plain, but I'll try to do that here:

I think the reason religiosity is so predominant among humans is that it is a response to the terrible randomness of nature and its awesome indifference toward humans and any individual in it. In the face of the universe's indifference, humans have tended to require some means of feeling secure against it, so they have imagined that the universe was not at all indifferent but deeply interested in us, and that the more obeisance we paid to that interest, the more interested it became. Now the universe never changed its attitude toward us, of course, but the meme that changed our attitude toward the universe succeeded in infecting the minds of people who were able to survive to spread it and pass it on to their offspring--and there really were no memes to rival it for tens of thousands of years of human evolution. You don't see anything rivaling it until humans develop the kind of social lifestyle and society-enhancing technology to enable leisurely analysis of human thought itself: the first layer of protection between humans and nature. The more layers added--or the greater the psychological distance--between us and nature in a given society, the more opportunities for atheism to strengthen against the religion meme.

Essentially--I guess I agree with Dawkins here--atheism is an antibody against religiosity. But like the sickle-cell gene in reverse, sort of, it doesn't work well in areas where the psychological distance between humans and nature breaks down.

Well, if what I'm saying is true, why is religiosity so persistent in the US, which is supposedly one of the most "advanced" and synthetic societies in the world?

That's a damn good question, my friend...

:popcorn:

[darkstar3]

41. So what you're positing

is that the false sense of security is somewhat necessary to continue production, procreation, and life in general?

I suppose I could see that. But then that's also true of small children. Take away their blanky, and the fear that overcomes them prevents them sometimes from functioning normally. We as a society believe that children outgrow the need for security blankets and the like, but now the question becomes "do they really?"

Some do.

[BurtWorm]

42. I think before humans as a species needed to feel 'wanted' by the universe

in order to thrive in it. Of course, this raises the question why other species don't have that need, presumably. But let's assume it has something to do with the kind of intelligence humans have. I think there's evidence that other hominoids, like Neanderthals and the 'hobbits' of Flor, also practiced religion-like rituals, so it seems that this meme probably originated in an ancestor species. Perhaps the religion meme contributed to the success of these species by binding them socially, as well as comforting them individually.

In any case, it's not until technology has enabled us to see that we're not actually at the center of the universe and we're not actually specially created that we have the maturity as a species to begin to see this religion meme for what it is. But not everyone is quite so interested in what's really going on in the universe as some people are. The universe continues to be a baffling, frightening place to live in on not to close inspection.

[darkstar3]

43. This has been another "Deep Thoughts".

Yes, I think you would be hard-pressed to argue convincingly that religion DIDN'T provide tribal and societal cohesion leading to propagation in the past. My main question is, as we all begin to see it for what it is, will we outgrow it, or will we become strangely addicted to it like Linus and his blue blanket?

[BurtWorm]

44. Our brains are probably just too imperfect to hope that humans generally will give up fuzzy thinking

It's difficult to even imagine the conditions that would lead to a general clarifying of human thought. It seems we will always have the fuzzy with us. The money question is, I think, how much can the proportions change?

[ChadwickHenryWard]

25. A nice summary of scientific findings.

It's rare to read science writing that good. I particularly liked the observation that modern sporting events share some things in common with religion. A friend of mine wrote a paper on that subject a few years ago. He listed as commonalities: extreme loyalty lacking any empirical or objective basis, vertical transmission of loyalty from parent to child, birth location as a major determinant of affiliation, exaltation of a small number of exceptional individuals, and superstitious practices. Kind of an interesting perspective.

[humblebum]

47. Much more likely to go Muslim given the immigration and birth rates. nt

[darkstar3]

48. That's quite a non-sensical point.

It also sounds eerily familiar...are you saying that WASPs should start having more babies if they want to survive?

At any rate, the OP is showing specifically how religion in general seems to be on the decline in certain countries considered to be forward-thinking and successful. Since Islam is a religion, it would scarecely qualify as a replacement for the entire concept of religion.

That would be a bit like an wino choosing beer as a replacement.