If one person’s religion has services that occur once a week, and that person goes every single week, and another person’s religion has services three times a week, and that person only goes twice a week, who is more religiously observant of their particular religion?
Once a week. Plus Thursday night choir practices (I sing tenor/whatever-because-I’m-the-only-male-left :(), and the Knights of Columbus, though I don’t know if that counts as attending church.
I’d go less often if I wasn’t musically involved in my parish, I suspect. Last week I went Presbyterien to play the organ at my teacher’s church.
And what if one person ignores their religion completely but attends services every week (as a social function or some such) and another scrupulously follows the dictates of their faith except for attending services?
What do you mean by statistically?
As Alessan points out, one can be an extremely observant Jew without ever going to services. Most Jewish practice is not service-based.
And who specifically uses this faulty measurement to gather statistics on religious observance?
In various polls I’ve seen.
Link to one, please, that uses frequency to determine how religiously observant a person is.
If the religion I belong to only gathers together once every two weeks, and I show up once every two weeks, how observant of my religion would you say I am?
More or less this, except I don’t celebrate Christmas or Easter either, so the last time I was at a service was either for a wedding or a baptism, I don’t recall which. Beyond that, I don’t really feel much need for service since, to me, the main purposes are teaching and worshipping, and I don’t agree with many of the teachings nor with the style of overt worship.
That said, I do still pray and meditate often. But even then, my styles of prayer and meditation differ substantially from how most Christians do it. It’s not every day, but generally at least a few times a week, usually I do it when I feel I need it rather than at a particular time, and sometimes I feel need more and sometimes I need less. However, I also spend lots of time studying and contemplating lessons, which is sort of like a higher functioning meditation for me as well, so perhaps it does work out to a nearly daily thing.
I guess I could pretend you are posting in good faith -
Cite, cite, cite, cite, cite, etc.
But you’re not, so it won’t do any good.
Regards,
Shodan
Dismissive snark aside, I bothered to read the links you googled.
1st link. Where does it address the issue at hand?
2nd. It only pertains to Catholics and protestants, and it recognizes the problem of just using attendance because evangelicals tend to skew higher, so they use a wide variety factors to determine religiosity.
3rd. URL not found. Did you even go to these links before posting them?
4th. Catholics only.
5th. Christian only. Not a study but a theory, and it defines intensity of religiosity on how people view the Bible, whether it is authoritative, frequency of attendance, and how much they tithe.
6th. Just an incredibly long list of articles with no way to determine what they conclude. I don’t know which cite is more useless-this one, or #3.
As I said, I’m an atheist, so I don’t have much of a dog in this fight, but I’m a bit puzzled by the hostility to Qin’s question. Obviously attendance at services isn’t a perfect measure of religiosity, but I agree that it’s a pretty reasonable measurement to take. In the US pretty much every major religion holds major services once a week, at which attendance is more or less expected, and if the congregation is large enough to support it, one or several gatherings during the rest of the week that are generally considered optional and may have a more narrow focus. This is true of every Christian denomination with which I’m familiar. In my limited experience, it is true of synagogues and mosques as well. When I was involved in Buddhism many years ago, it was even true of the Buddhist center I frequented, even though Buddhism has no tradition I know of of weekly services. It was just a convenient schedule that mirrors what most people in the US are used to. Even purely secular groups tend to meet either weekly monthly in the US, and I doubt anyone would cavil if someone posted a poll asking people how often they engage in their favorite hobby, attend AA meetings, participate in political activities, etc., with once a week being the median answer. Sure, if you’re comparing hobbies, someone who makes a committed effort to witness every total solar eclipse visible on land somewhere in the world is far more committed to their hobby than someone who does the Jumble every single day, but if you’re just trying to get a general feel for how engaged people are, frequency of participation is a pretty good metric.
Likewise, some religions will place a higher emphasis on attending services while others will place very little emphasis on it. But overall, even among Buddhists in the US, in my experience it’s a pretty decent objective measure of how actively one is involved in the Buddhist community. That’s not the same as how committed a Buddhist one is, but there’s really no way to compare the very different religious requirements of Orthodox Judaism, Zen Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism. Frequency of communal worship/practice is at least directly comparable.
Same here. I don’t feel I need to show up at a building to consider myself “observant.”
Not to knock the people that do, because that is how they feel they should be observant and that’s cool with me.
What hostility? I merely questioned whether frequency of attendance to church services was the best way to determine how religiously observant a person is. The OP claimed that that was how it was determined statistically, and I requested a cite. The OP responded that that was how it was done in various polls he had seen, so I resubmitted my request for just one cite. The OP didn’t respond, but Shodan did dismissively…with six of the most useless links I’ve seen in a month of Sundays. Is asking for a simple cite that backs up an OP’s claims really being hostile?
edited to add: I have no problem with the poll itself-only with using it to determine how religiously observant one is.
It seemed to me like a lot of people were challenging him over what seemed to me a pretty obvious matter.
Here is a page from the Pew Center showing how rates of religious attendance are used in surveys of religiosity. It’s usually used along with questions about affiliation, daily prayer, and belief in God, all things that are at least equally subject to noise due to different expectations between groups. You can look at several of the surveys listed to see how it is used in actual polls. How Religious Is Your State is a good example, as are this analysis of African-Americans and religion and this report on religion and voting in the last presidential election. In all of them, weekly attendance at worship services is a key metric for measuring religiosity. And here is a Wikipedia article on religiosity as a sociological measurement.
Clearly from these cites, asking about worship attendance alone is not sufficient to give a detailed, scientifically accurate picture of religious devotion, but it’s an important metric, and it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for someone to be curious about on the Dope.
Noting that no study given so far uses only attendance to determine how religiously observant one is, or even uses that factor as a primary source, perhaps asking what percentage of someone’s religious services are attended would be better, and saying that it would help determine how religiously observant one was?
Czarcasm, what’s your point? Qin asked a question. It seems like a reasonable question to be curious about. When pressed to explain why he asked it, he responded that he had seen surveys use the question to measure religiosity. I’ve now provided cites showing that surveys do, in fact, use it as such a measure. Is it the only or necessarily the best measure of religiosity? No, but it’s the one Qin happens to be interested in. So what?
IF I titled a thread, “Which restaurant has the best service?”, but titled the attached poll, “Which restaurant has the cleanest restrooms?”, would you say the poll is a good way to determine the answer to the question in the thread title, even though having a clean restroom is certainly an important factor?
I’m not sure how asking about the percentage of services attended would be better. If Judaism doesn’t require any attendance at services, would any attendance count as 100%? If someone attends a Catholic parish, do they count the daily masses that are held (sometimes several times a day) or just the Sunday ones?
I’d probably point out the poorly thought out thread title and then drop it if the OP made it clear which question was the one intended. People ask slightly different questions in the thread title and the poll all the time. It’s almost never worth debating. This is IMHO, not GD, and even in GD it would call for clarification, nothing more. Besides, No one in real life uses clean restrooms as a measure of overall service that I’m aware of. People do use attendance at services as a measure of religious observance, and even if no one else ever did, I think any poster would be perfectly well justified in posting the same OP as Qin and justifying it (though why they would need to is still beyond me) by saying nothing more than that it seemed like a reasonably good metric to use for a casual survey on an internet message board. It’s not like we’re generating rigorous scientific data here anyway.
Again, if I posted a thread titled “How committed to your hobby are you?” with a poll asking how often you engage in activities related to it, would you harp on about how you can be committed to a hobby even if you only do it once a year, or would you accept that I’m just trying to use a simple metric for answering a casual question in a simple way?