What happens to societies with majority non-religious people?

[ralph124c]

I agree-there is a lot more to religiosity than going to church. Take a guy who watched Joel Osteen on Sunday-does that count as religious? I know quite a number of people who are religious (as far as attending church), but are total dicks otherwise.

[Huvudtvatt]

@ITR_champion

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

Really? What religions things does the Swedish government spend their money on?

[gracer]

@Hari_Seldon

My daughter lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a hotbed of anti-vaxxers, and definitely not a hotbed of church goers. I don’t think any inference can be drawn. Our family doctor says that parents who refuse vaccinations are child abusers.

Huh? Not sure what you mean here. In the Netherlands, it is the religious people who are the anti-vax crowd. I’m not inferring, just stating. They are currently out of favour for being religious anti-vax nuts, which causes problems for the rest of society. Without religious anti-vax nutcases Dutch society would be better because fewer children would suffer/die of preventable diseases.

I dunno about Brooklyn, I’m not inferring anything about your variety of anti-vax nuts.

[Huvudtvatt]

@Huvudtvatt

Really? What religions things does the Swedish government spend their money on?

Answering my own question here with the relevant numbers I could find in the Swedish government budget for 2013:

Support for religious organizations: 75.232 Million SEK
Administration of support for religious organizations: 6.982 Million SEK
Compensation to the Church of Sweden for maintenance of items of cultural heritage 460 Million SEK

The total spending of the 2013 budget seems to be around 1000 billion SEK if I read it correctly so these posts account for around 0.054 % of the total budget. This is probably more than the US government spends but still not very much, and most of it goes into taking care of old churches.

[Siam_Sam]

As for North Korea, it’s full of supernatural goodness that’s taken as fact. I recall when Kim Il-sung died, some mountain reportedly twisted itself around in agony. All sorts of animal life supposedly mourned the death of his son recently. North Korea is a very supernatural place it would seem, and the Kims are the head of a de-facto religion.

[MarcusF]

@lavenderviolet

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.

I think this is very true. It will be interesting to see the cultural effects after a couple of generations of children brought up without a strong religious background.

@Maastricht

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.

I think this is overstating it. I don’t believe many people are “atheist” in the sense of being sure there is no God. My feeling most Europeans just aren’t bothered. It’s not something they can get too excited about. In the UK in particular there is a definite bias against strong expressions of religious faith. (Maybe a Church of England thing!) It’s significant that Tony Blair felt he had to wait until he was no longer Prime Minister before he could speak about his religious views. The sort of declaration of faith all American politicians seem to have to make is seen as a real vote loser over here.