[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Except, again, that’s not what the OP asked; Stoneburg asked how to do it, not whether you thought it was a good idea.
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It’s impossible to answer without knowing more parameters. What are the goals here? A fully atheistic society? Some percentage of the society atheistic? To simply win this silly competition? To simply encourage atheism without any real goal?
Depending on how you answer that will depend on how a country could attempt…whatever it is that they are supposed to be attempting to do. Several of those have been tried in the past and haven’t been all that successful, historically.
It’s the only way to make them stop (or start) believing, though. If you just want some nebulous positive move towards atheism, then I’d say that liberal democracies are already moving in those directions. It gets back to what the goal is here.
I’d like to see a cite that more scientific education leads to less religion. I haven’t seen any in this thread; and in past threads I’ve posted cites that refute that assertion, showing that spiritual belief is no less common among scientists.
[QUOTE=Simplicio]
Seriously people. The OP was five sentences long, its not that hard to parse what he’s asking.
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Then it gets back to what the actual goals are. A totally atheistic society? Some fixed percentage of the population being atheistic? Simply a pro-atheistic environment so people can choose? I think asking ‘why would a country want to do this’ is part of answering the OP, but YMMV.
It doesn’t answer the question though. Spread how? What does ‘spread’ even mean? Encourage atheism? Force it? Merely give it a friendly environment? Depending on how you answer that is going to influence how a country COULD ‘spread atheism’…or whether it would work at all. Since liberal democracies already give a more atheist friendly environment, I’m guessing that’s not what the OP means. He’s looking for more direct methods. So, what are the goals? 100% atheist? 80%? 50%? 20%? Just enough to win the contest the OP mentioned? And what are the parameters? Will force be allowed? Sanctions? Penalties for continued theistic belief? Or will it merely be encouragement? Indirect methods using education, even though that’s no guarantee of conversion from theism to atheism? Will agnostics be counted and allowed?
Being “connected to religion”, however you define that, is not the same as bias.
In my internet career I’ve probably had scores of atheists assure me that they’ve got statistical evidence of a strong, positive relationship between education and lack of religion, but whenever I ask them for a citation I never get one. (The best attempt that I’ve seen is the list of studies that got debunked in this thread.) So I hereby ask you again to provide a citation.
I guess we can all have our opinions about what areas are important. However, the article does establish that there are some questions in response to which the educated groups showed more religiosity than the public as a whole, such as church attendance. You’re free to say that’s less important if you wish to, but it still torpedoes the claim that there’s an intrinsic link between being religious and uneducated.
I see no reason why it should be either, but rather it’s just that tens of millions of Americans alive today were born at a time when it was difficult or impossible for them to get a college education due to their gender or race or both. On average women are much more religious than men and blacks and other racial minorities much more religious than whites, so laws and policies that blocked those groups from getting a college education had the effect of making religious people less educated on average. The paper I linked to mentions this.
Mm. One teensy nitpick: professors and scientists (PS) were more likely to attend church when controlling for all other regressors constant. PS were actually less likely overall to attend than any other group except men. There are no standard errors in Table 2, but PS were five percentage points less likely to attend church than the graduate schooled and seven percentage points less likely than “all others”; this seems reasonably significant.
Why does this matter? The regression results condition out the effect of irreligion, which is probably a huge determinant of whether someone attends church. This doesn’t support your statement terribly well:
(I would take issue with your wording: econometricians, and to a lesser extent applied statisticians generally, are not looking for “intrinsic links”; we’re looking for links that are on average causal. Failing to find an “intrinsic” link between religiosity and education is not only not damning to the hypothesis that education causes lower religiosity, it’s entirely expected. But anyway.)
The results of Stark et al., if we trust them, imply that—holding constant demographics and level of religiosity—switching a random individual from no PhD to PhD will increase church attendance by a very small amount, statistically insignificant at any conventional level. It will also decrease the probability that the individual (1) prays; (2) is a “strong member” of a church; (3) is “close to god”; (4) believes in an afterlife; (5) believes in the bible; and (6) has a religion at all. 3, 4, 5, and 6 are statistically significant at the 0.95 level, (1) at the 0.7 level.
So we find that PS are only no more or less likely to attend church when we condition out level of religiousness; they are unconditionally quite less likely to attend church; and even when conditioning on other regressors they exhibit a lower propensity toward every other measure of religiosity. Given that there are a gazillion alternative explanations why an atheistic individual might attend church (anecdotally, I’ve known atheistic Jews to attend church, and it’s relevant that this demographic group is also more likely than average to be highly educated).
That’s a very plausible theory, but it has to contend with a few facts. Religiosity is negatively correlated with religion in other nations with more egalitarian educational policies. Further, even as the relevant population of older individuals dies out, the correlation between religiosity and education in the US has recently grown more negative, when that theory would predict otherwise.
I’m very disappointed that you have overlooked my citations in that thread (and, by implication, mischaracterize my involvement), particularly posts 96 and 102. I cite several papers, most recent, indicating that religiosity is negatively correlated with intelligence; that even within the US religiosity is negatively correlated with education for those of more “fervent” denominations; and that, for denominations within which religiosity is positively correlated with education overall, this benefit is applied to certain groups and withheld from others (e.g. adult women).
I do not wish to conclude that you ignore evidence contrary to your beliefs, but that is how it appears.
Er, apologies for the grammatical weirdness in that first post.
To clarify this statement: The regression results imply that, if take into account the effect of religiousness on church attendance (as proxied by childhood religion), then being a professor or scientist is a bad predictor of church attendance. But that’s head-slappingly obvious. Being religious should be the primary reason why someone attends church; we should expect the effect of higher education on church attendance to act through the mechanism of causing someone to be more or less religious.
With that in mind, it’s actually strange how the coefficients on professor/scientist are so significant in the other regressions. Bare probit coefficients are rather uninterpretable, however, so it isn’t even clear to me how large the effects actually are.
Going by the summaries that you posted I don’t see that at all. In post 96, you summarized three studies: one showed negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity (at the national and not personal level), the other two showed “religion correlates positively with educational attainment” and “the positive effects of education on religion can be explained in terms of the accumulation of social capital”. In post 102, the first two studies show negative correlation of IQ with religious belief. The fourth shows no relationship of religious beliefs to education but positive relationships in other areas for education. The third, fifth, and sixth are looking at specific religious groups rather than the effect of religion generally. So the take-home message would seem to be that there are many studies on the topic, some show positive correlation of religiosity to education or IQ, some show negative correlation, and some show none. Now surely anyone with a scientific mindset agrees that when facing multiple studies that don’t agree, we must acknowledge that the issue is not settled, yet most atheists in this thread are instead simply declaring that it is settled in favor of the conclusion they want. (Also I’m one of those who doesn’t treat IQ as a meaningful meaure of intelligence.)
It isn’t 100% relevant to the thread, but I couldn’t let that go uncommented. Germany does have some unusual mixes between state and church (like church taxes), but we definitely have no explicit state religion (btw., which one should that be?). Here’s the wiki article on freedom of religion in Germany.
You’re right in stating that there are some strange quirks like religious education and school masses in German public schools, but these are non-obligatory.