What happens to societies with majority non-religious people?

Great Debates
21

One thing to keep in mind is that just a society has become less religious over the last generation or two doesn’t mean that they are no longer influenced by cultural values/beliefs of the old religions.

My husband was raised atheist (in the sense that they just never taught him to believe in anything in particular, not that they actively tried to convince him there is no God). However, I do think that some of the values his parents raised him with were probably products of the fact that his parents were raised in religion.

22

There are variances of non-religion. Some people are hostile to religion, some are apathetic, some are agnostic, etc.

According to this

The rates of irreligion are 50%+ in most of the west. Even the US is 36%.

23

According to wikipedia, Canada is pushing 61% irreligiosity, and well all know what a hell-hole it is!

Accordingly, France is at 75% irreligiosity. Way to go.

But Denmark, at 83%. Wow, horrifying place it must be!

And there’s Afghanistan, at 3% irreligiosity. Clearly, it must be God’s paradise on Earth

To reduce snarkiness slightly, it does appear that U.S. is the nicest place to live among countries with under 50% irreligiosity, unless Kazakhstan is a nicer country than I think it is.

24

Adding religion to financial and social decisions is certainly no guarantee that charismatic, eloquent speakers won’t get people to do unthinkable things. Quite the opposite actually, especially when they speak for a “higher authority” they alone can interpret and appeal to their “we’re right, you’re wrong” base.

25

Having trouble with your question. Howard Roark was an atheist but nevertheless a deeply religious man.

26

Can’t speak for the perfidious Swedes, but I think most people just don’t understand Denmark when it comes to religion – or most other things. Danes are probably a lot more religious than you think, it’s just that public display such as church attendance is not a big part of it. Both on account of general national character and because of the very influential teaching of Grundvig.
Meanwhile 80% of the population are members of just a single church, even though it costs them money. There are also arguments that the whole Scandinavian welfare model is a realization of Lutheran Christianity, certainly Danes reach morally to such issues as helping the poor, aid, abortion, etc.

27

According to wikipedia about 7% of Australians go to church. Only about 22% indicated that they have no religion on a census form. Instead they largely mark “catholic” or “protestant”. My view for what it is worth is that this is essentially a cultural not religious indication.

IME many (most, I think) Australians might, in some sense, identify themselves as “catholic” for example because that’s what their family background is, in some general sense. They may have attended or their parents may have attended catholic schools, say. But they are not in any active sense religious and may well not believe in any god. I know very, very few people who believe in any god, but know heaps of nominal “catholics”.

Needless to say, Australian society is not much different in morality from the more religions western democracies such as the US.

My view is that this is unsurprising: religion’s claim to be the source of morality is simply a conceit. People the world over adhere to very common ideas of basic morality no matter what religion they do or don’t belong to. It fits the facts far better to assume religion co-opted existing morality than to assume morality sprang from religion.

28

North Korea manages very well eschewing any belief in the supernatural, whilst being actively hostile to all organized religion.

29

Originally Posted by IMfez (the OP)
What changes can be attributed to the mass loss of religious belief?

Look around you.

30

Not just in Scandinavia, but in most Western European countries atheism is the default setting. Unless you state otherwise, people will assume you are an atheist.

Seeing the crusade many religious Americans hold against atheism is incredibly… not just scary, but incredibly misguided. Holland and Germany, Norway and Denmark, have been atheistic countries for decades now. And nothing bad has happened. These countries score higher on several happiness meters. They have a lower rate of crime, poverty, abortions and teenage pregnancy then the USA does. People are spiritually aware, with or without (a kind of) God, and feel connected to their community.

Watching people feel all moral for wanting to “keep their kids away from atheists destroying their faith”… To me, it is as absurd as when they would claim that you can’t be a moral happy person and have brown eyes. Or red hair. Or like country music. Or eat spaghetti.

:: shakes head::

I have also quoted often on these boards the statistics on teenage pregnancies and abortions:
The TLDR version is: "Religiously inspired abstinism does not reduce teenage sex and pregnancies. You know what does? Freely available sex-education that demystifies and de-emphasises teenage sex. As well as freely available birth control paired with factual information on how to use it.

31

Also, like said upthread for Denmark, religious feelings can easily take other forms then instititionalized religion.

For some people, religion has been about woo, symbolic trinkets, flickering candles, and feeling connected to something bigger then yourself. For them, there is a whole market in scented candles, chrystal pyramids, buddhist prayer beads, and meditation weekend courses.

For others, religions main attraction was to feel that they were doing it right and that all the others were doing it wrong, were evil, and will be punished. Those people just mutter to themselves and others behind their particular falvour of newspaper or political party or they just complain to each other at work or in the bar about how those idiots are making sure the world goes to hell in a handbasket.

For some nerds, what they found in religion was the deep discussions about the stories. Well, Star Trek and LOTR offer those, too.

Yet other kinds of nerds, like myself, are deeply interested in discussing good and evil in mankind and history. They are interested in the question “how should we live”. And I’m sorry to say that law, literature and social sciences have a lot more to offer in that regard then Christian religion.

32

I’ll use Wiki as my mostly one stop source, since many are going that way also, and throw these in as well, without commenting much just yet what to make of it all, because I’ve only spent perhaps 30 minutes on it thus far.

Wesley Clark already linked up to the irreligious countries. Here’s a few more things to think about. Countries with highest and lowest suicide rates. China comes in at 22.3 per 100,000 inhabitants. Japan at 21.7. Russia 20.2. United States at 12.0. Germany 9.9. Netherlands 8.8. Mexico 4.0. Jamaica 0.1. There are 110 countries listed, so just picked up on a small sample.

Countries with highest and lowest homicide rate. Just comparing some regions for now, Africa had the highest rate coming in at 17.0 per 100,000 inhabitants. The Americas were not too far behind coming in at 15.4. Asia it dropped significantly to just 3.1. Europe was comparable at 3.5. The countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Columbia are among the highest murder rates of any country. America had a homicidal rate of 4.8 per 100,000 inhabitants. Compare to Russia with over 10.2, and Canada doing quite well at 1.6. China also does exceptionally well here at 1.0, as did Japan at 0.4, Hong Kong, 0.2, and Singapore 0.3. Mexico came in at 23.7 and Columbia at 31.4.

The statistics were gathered from the UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) and perhaps the money behind drugs is one of the bigger factors among many that help perpetuate the violence in a few of these countries, anyway.

Upon first glance, it seems Asians are more inclined to kill themselves than one another. Those in the America’s are more likely to kill you than themselves. But I’ll need to look at this some more.

Greenland had the highest suicide rate at 100.8. Neighboring Iceland is 11.3. Greenland’s homicidal rate is 19.3 and Iceland’s 0.3. So contrasting differences between the two.

In the United States, here is a Gallup poll of the most religious and least religious states. Wiki under an article of Atheism says that religious states commit more crime than the non-religious states, but doesn’t give a citation for it. I’ve seen other places that do, but don’t have the time to dig for them. I’m sure the level of education or the lack of it also plays a role, but no time to dig up those either.

I’ll leave it up to the true statisticians to make out what all of this really means.

33

Less than 40% of US citizens regularly attend church. So I chance that means we’re living in a society with a majority of non-religious people.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/rel_rate.htm

34

Well it does all come down to how you define “irreligious.”

The Gallup poll uses people who answered “no” to the question “is religion important in your life?” That’s where the high Denmark number comes from. An overwhelming majority of Danes do not apparently think religion is important.

But other considerations:
% of active church/synagogue/mosque/temple goers.
% of self-identified atheists/agnostics.
% of people who believe in the supernatural, but do not follow any flavor of a major religion.
% of people who self-identify as associating with a religion, but don’t really believe much or any of that religion’s supernatural claims. (“Culturally” religious.)

What we can certainly conclude, based on the evidence, is that less religious countries are not necessarily in any way worse countries to live in than religious ones. Whether you can further conclude that the religious countries are more likely to be associated with violence and unhappiness is debatable, but the data are quite suggestive of that conclusion. My hypothesis is simply that miserable people are more likely to seek religion, lacking other options.

35

Don’t you consider the Kim Il Sung / Kim Sung Il / Kim Sung Un personality cult an organized religion?

36

Going back to the OT, I imagine societies with majority non-religious people will be less likely to spend taxpayer’s money on religious holiday decorations in public areas.

37

Was this intended as irony? Their leadership includes two dead guys and they can’t even manage the basics such as feeding themselves.

38

An excellent post. I do not think that the concept of how religious a person is can be captured in just one number or in an answer to just one question. In earlier times, at least within the USA and Europe, it might have been assumed that the standard picture of a religious person meant going to church or synagogue once a week. But even then, a religious person might attend services less often than that or more often. There are no guarantees.

At the present time, we have phenomena such as house churches, cell groups, “the emergent church” and other things that blur the line regarding what exactly it means to ‘go to church’. Furthermore, the church model of religious participation does not necessarily apply to all religions equally, as for some branches of Buddhism or Taoism, for instance, there’s no expectation that a practitioner show up at a particular building at a particular time once per week.

Further, religion can permeate a society in ways beyond what makes individuals identify as members. In Scandinavia, for instances, they have a centuries-long heritage of Lutheranism even if many people don’t call themselves that any more, and institutions from that period still hanging around. Contra what Ranger Jeff and seems to think, countries such as Sweden are much more willing to spend government money on religions things that the USA, and religious schools play a much larger role.

39

Do some Chinese sort of have a worship the State type of mentality?

40

I heard the former leader was quite an impressive golfer. Ever hear of Kim Jong il’s amazing golfing skills? He had other amazing abilities as well, obviously something supernatural was going on because there was plenty of eyewitnesses too, and I would think if any one doubted it, they would have come forward. Not like anything would have happened to them. :wink: