Post No.: 0571
Furrywisepuppy says:
Why are some populations far less religious than others?
There are contextual reasons, such as one’s sense of security and safety, which stems from factors like living in an affluent area of a city, and having other, secular, institutions in place (e.g. a stable government) that offer healthcare, social services and childcare to citizens. The latter can thus replace the need for religious institutions. (Absolute monarchies have also declined over time due to more liberalism and democracy.)
But whilst this may reduce the need for religious institutions – religious beliefs may still persist, hence we can still consider ourselves ‘spiritual’ but not religious.
Yet even so – spiritual, as well as religious, beliefs have declined over time due to having more scientific explanations for phenomena. The elders traditionally pass down the cultural knowledge of their communities hence why in most religions the elders are the most important to listen to – but the rapid advance of scientific knowledge nowadays can make some of the knowledge of elders grossly untenable and outdated.
There are also dispositional reasons, such as if an individual is relatively more analytical, reflective, rational and logical in reasoning (they use their critical thinking ‘system two’ relatively more) rather than intuitive (they trust their automatic ‘system one’ relatively more). These traits can, partly, explain why some people will more likely become less religious or spiritual.
This is a broad generalisation but people who are more susceptible to spiritual or religious beliefs have a tendency to trust in their intuitions first then stop – rather than stop, reflect and reason through questions or problems. It’s mainly our system one, with its fast intuitions, biases or heuristics, that leads us to believing in cognitively attractive spiritual or religious beliefs, due to instinctive psychological predispositions like theory of mind and mind-body dualism. Women tend to exhibit greater theory of mind, and women tend to hold more spiritual or religious-type beliefs than men on average.
The greater one’s tendency and ability to critically reflect on things, the lower one’s reliance on intuition, and the lower the chance of believing in spiritual or religious beliefs. This effect is causal too, at least temporarily. Inducing or priming people to conduct in analytical thinking – by getting them to slow down and deliberately engage in effortful critical thinking – can reduce the strength of their spiritual or religious beliefs.
Analytical thinking doesn’t automatically lead to atheism per se but more broadly increases the questioning and rejection of standard or orthodox beliefs. (Atheists come in many different flavours but whether, say, agnostic versus gnostic, what they have in common is that they all don’t believe in a god or gods.)
The ‘Flynn effect’ – the trend of average IQ scores increasing over the generations in industrialised countries (at least up until relatively recently) – correlates with the trend of lower rates of religiosity over time too. However, the causal reason(s) for this effect may not be down to increasingly lower rates of religiosity but better teaching methods, more specific practice with IQ-type tests, increased nutrition, epigenetic effects, lower rates of infectious diseases during childhood, or a combination of such factors. (The Flynn effect has been exhibiting a reverse progression of late, and hypotheses for why include increased air pollution, ‘teaching subjects to the test’ and ‘cultural stagnation’.)
There are also sometimes reasons to be estranged or disaffected with organised institutional religions – perhaps due to learning about the various church child sexual abuse cases and cover-ups, or that religious beliefs seem to be at the core of many schisms in the world and reasons for triggering conflicts. These essentially act as CRUDs (or credibility undermining displays). One doesn’t necessarily need to favour science and scepticism, or overtly revolt against religion, to not be religious, but these factors would definitely contribute. Hearing about religious hypocrisy, honour killings, the oppression of women, or homophobia, within religious circles will likely play a part in one’s decision. Hypocrisy is evident on all sides though (e.g. a non-religious group spreading over-generalised fear and hate about a religious group, at the same time as claiming that this religious group is spreading fear and hate in society).
Spiritual beliefs, including in the supernatural, paranormal, ESP (extrasensory perception), telepathy, telekinesis, healing crystals or faith healing, tarot cards, astrology, clairvoyance, karma, reincarnation, immaterial spirits and deities, and similar, also tend to come as a package (e.g. people believing in prophecies of apocalypses and also believing in Ouija boards being able to contact the dead). This is because all spiritual beliefs stem from the exact same innate cognitive machinery that leads to formal religious beliefs – except these spiritual beliefs aren’t (yet) wrapped up in a fully-formed religious context with particular gods, characters, stories and places of practice.
We all share the same cognitive predispositions, such as mind-body dualism, hyperactive agency detection, promiscuous teleology, and a fuzzy fear of death or uncertainty, for instance – thus there is much to draw us towards believing in spiritual or religious-type beliefs in one form or another. The intuitive pull of spiritual or religious-type beliefs is strong on both a motivational level and a cognitive level, and it’s incredibly effortful and difficult to teach people to contradict their intuitions.
But whilst these help explain why individuals come to think in spiritual or religious-type ways – other group-level factors are also needed to unify and shape beliefs into an organised institutional religion. What happens is that individual spiritual beliefs may culturally evolve over time, and if they ever become popular enough and believers of particular beliefs amass together sufficiently, then they might then turn their beliefs into a fully-formed religion with canonical (as in official) stories, heroes, rituals, annual traditions and so forth.
It’s all about psychology and social psychology. Even down to the way that – out of all of the possible forms to imagine what an ultimate being will be like – humans mostly tend to imagine and create gods that are humanoid in form because of the innate tendency to anthropomorphise things. (So does God suffer from lower back pain too?(!))
With most countries today, the wealthier a country is according to its GDP per capita, the less religious it tends to be on average. There are some noteworthy exceptions though like Kuwait – possibly due to the law of small numbers because it has a small population? China – possibly due to self-response biases because of social pressures for citizens to claim a low religiosity there even though religion isn’t officially banned there anymore? (There’s also disagreement as to whether Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism should really be defined more as philosophies than religions?) And the USA – possibly due to self-response biases because of a case of ‘the emperor wearing no clothes’ or many citizens claiming that they’re highly religious due to social pressures to ‘fit in with the norm’ because they think most of their fellow citizens around them are religious when less actually truly are? Or it could be due to the country’s relative rejection of ‘big government’ and the lack of adequate social welfare i.e. even though a country does well in GDP terms, it doesn’t necessarily mean this wealth will always trickle down to the poor, and thus the USA has a high level of inequality for such a ‘developed’ country (GDP per capita doesn’t tell us anything about how that wealth is distributed within a nation). This means that religion may remain as a psychological safety net for a lot of poor citizens.
However, since all of this information is merely correlational, we can only speculate on the real causes.
Yet what we do know is that secular and religious institutions play an interchangeable role in many areas, such as regarding social welfare – thus the more government/public welfare a country spends per capita, the less religious a country’s citizens tend or need to be on average. Read Post No.: 0551 for more about how secular institutions and religiosity are interrelated. This would make the last explanation (a lack of adequate social welfare for all) probably the most likely reason for the USA’s relatively high religiosity for its GDP per capita.
So it’s probably more precisely the feeling of security and stability that predicts a lower level of religiosity, not wealth per se – although of course wealth usually brings with it security and stability. State welfare (e.g. publicly-funded education for all children, a national health service, unemployment benefits, state pensions) provides a level of stress reduction that people without such a safety net look to find in religion instead. We don’t have to pray for them, as it were. In uncertain times, religiosity rises for its palliative functions, whilst in stable, safe, secure and prosperous times, religiosity is considered less necessary and so tends to fall. A lot of people definitely start praying to a god they didn’t believe in once they feel like they’re about to die!
The reasons why particular individuals will or won’t become religious, however, will still depend highly upon individual factors such as the religiosity of one’s own family and immediate community. CREDs (or credibility enhancing displays) are a key transmitter of religiosity between generations – if children watch their parents sincerely perform rituals then they’ll likely become religious too.
But in the absence of CREDs, the next generation will find it easier to turn away from religion and will be much less likely to turn to religion, and so, generation-by-generation, this trend will eventually result in a generation that’s very low in religiosity as a whole. And even if the secular safety nets, such as government welfare, are subsequently removed, these people won’t be accustomed to turning to religion as a source of psychological security; although this could change (back) over time.
…Now we must not generalise every individual who follows a religion, culture or group though – these are not deterministic claims. All we can ever say (which is the same in all of the social sciences) is that we hold a certain level of probability on which we’re resting a prediction. Generalisations are just that – they apply to the group generally, but not necessarily to every individual within that group. And the more finely we want to predict a behaviour or pin it onto an individual, the less confident our predictions are going to be.
That’s unless we know and understand absolutely every single relevant part (and every moving part) of a system, but this is in most cases unfeasible (whether currently or ever practically). It’s like there’s far too much chaos to say ‘a lightning strike will happen exactly here at exactly this time’, although we can more confidently say ‘a lightning strike or two is likely to happen somewhere in this broad location around this time’ – and that’s despite most people accepting that (even though it’s practically stochastic, hence ‘ensemble forecasting’ works very well) the weather fundamentally behaves deterministically (like rolling a die is practically stochastic but fundamentally deterministic). This is why the more, and more accurate and precise, data related to temperatures, humidity and so forth we can gather around the world, and compute – the more accurate our forecasts should be. Predictions tend to become more uncertain the further ahead in time we’re trying to predict too. And human social trends can of course change over time, thus what’s true for today may not necessarily be true for tomorrow due to some new, exogenous or previously unconsidered causal factor(s).
Anyway, there are individual reasons for being religious or non-religious, spiritual or non-spiritual, theist or atheist, such as looking for a coping mechanism after a loss, or seeing something as a sign of a miracle after a near-loss. Yet global statistics in the social sciences are still useful when interpreted and used in the right ways, such as for finding trends, forming policies or directing resources.
Woof.
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