Well, basically yes. A nation built out of the Enlightenment, by founders that were highly skeptical of religion but whose people had decreasing (am I right here ?) values that seem Enlightenment compatible. This, if true, is interesting intellectually and has practical results.
Alright, glad you’ve committed to a topic.
Can you clarify what you mean by “decreasing values that seem Enlightenment compatible”? I cannot parse that phrase.
Higher education = less likely to believe in God and consider religion to be important personally and for society.
Pointing to better high school results for children in religious families is just correlation. Children with a similar social framework and family involvement probably enjoy the same outcome.
I don’t believe any American politician really DOES have a religious belief. If it didn’t effect the votes and financial support they get, you wouldn’t hear it mentioned. Any American I’ve ever met is really far from being religious; they just SAY they are in the off-chance that it might help their “soul” or “karma”.
The founders held a variety of religious beliefs (and it’s still up for debate exactly what some of them actually believed). If they did have a consensus, it was that religious freedom (and not just “freedom from religion,” as you keep saying) was desirable, and that the U.S. should not have an official state religion. There are good arguments to be made that the separation of church and state is precisely why religion has flourished in the U.S. as it has.
The founding fathers had diverse viewpoints on religion. What they were after was basically a separation of church and state, however, not to make the country a secular country without any religion at all. That was totally against what they were getting at with their freedom of religion, and would have been extremely unpopular with the citizens fighting for the new nation…many of which had fled Europe to get away from being persecuted over religion.
Again, you have to look at how religion played a part historically to understand why the US, a country without a state religion and one where there are protected religious freedoms is less secular than many European nations where there still ARE state religions. It’s really not all that difficult to see why we are where we are today and they are where they are.
It’s often described as “a mile wide and an inch deep”. Breadth, yes. Depth? Not so much.
Did you read what you just linked to? Here’s some of what it says:
Conventional wisdom has it that there is an inverse relationship between individuals’ education and religiosity levels – that is, the higher a person’s level of education, the less likely he or she is to be religious. That may be accurate with regard to some aspects of religion, but recent Gallup research suggests that in others it is not necessarily the case.
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Results from other survey questions indicate that more highly educated people are at least as likely to go to church. Seventy percent of postgraduate degree holders say they are members of a congregation, compared to 64% of those with a high school education or less. And the percentage of postgraduates (47%) and those with a high school education or less (43%) were essentially the same.
The data also reveal a fascinating – and important – difference between those with a high level of education and those with minimal education. The former group is less likely to trust organized religion but more likely to trust clergy members, while the latter is more likely to trust organized religion and less likely to trust the clergy. Only 34% of postgraduate degree holders say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in organized religion, while 52% of those with a high school education or less say so. In addition, 63% of the postgraduate group give “high” or “very high” marks to the ethical standards of clergy, while only 43% of those with a high school education or less do so.
And is the poll that you linked to not “just correlation”? It would seem that there are some areas of measurment where education and religiosity have a negative correlation but other areas where they have a positive correlation. According to this paper:
In numerous analyses of cross-sectional survey data, rates of religious belief and religious activity tend not to decline with income, and most rates increase with education. … Over the past 40 years, scores of sociological studies have investigated the empirical relationship between income and/or education and numerous measures of religiosity—see, for example, Lenski (1963), Stark (1972), Wade Roof and William McKinney (1987), and Ross Stolzenberg, Mary Bair-Loy and Linda Waite (1995). Since the mid-1970s economists have weighed in, estimating models more sensitive to nuances of economic theory. Their basic results, however, mirror those of the sociologists: education is a weak but generally positive predictor of religious participation.
So the bulk of research on the topic indicates a positive relationship between religiosity and education.
I read it, thanks. What is says is:
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Those with higher education are less likely to believe in God
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Those with higher education who do believe in God are more likely to participate in religious observances than those with lower education
I will excuse myself from this thread for a few hours. There are very exciting and perhaps encouraging results in the Israel elections, all my bandwidth is taken at present.
If you really wish to “induce” belief in God, I think spiking the unbeliever’s food with certain mushrooms is your surest way to go.