Concerning the BBC article, I would recommend highly the book Sacred and Secular by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. It basically goes a lot deeper, sociologically and statistically, than this article into why some societies tend to religion while others tend to secularism. Its basic argument is that people tend to be religious when they have a lot of uncertainty about their existence; this is why the poor are generally more religious than the rich, so countries with large social divides tend to be stronger bastions of religion than countries with general equality (that explains why the United States is an anomaly among the wealthy nations of the world in having religion as so powerful a force in society).
Note that most of the countries listed in the article - Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland - are highly developed, very relatively wealthy in the world, and generally strongly favour social equality and social welfare programs (can't speak for the current state of the Czech Republic, or Switzerland's health care system). Being poor in most of these countries, though uncomfortable, is not the huge and frightening burden it would be in a country like, er, Libya. Nor is it as culturally acceptable for the rich to flaunt stretch Hummers as it is in some other states.
The article's writers seriously skewed their sample, I would say. Religion may get extinct? In those cherry-picked countries, maybe. Globally - you have to end poverty first.
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Date: 2011-03-24 10:24 pm (UTC)Concerning the BBC article, I would recommend highly the book Sacred and Secular by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. It basically goes a lot deeper, sociologically and statistically, than this article into why some societies tend to religion while others tend to secularism. Its basic argument is that people tend to be religious when they have a lot of uncertainty about their existence; this is why the poor are generally more religious than the rich, so countries with large social divides tend to be stronger bastions of religion than countries with general equality (that explains why the United States is an anomaly among the wealthy nations of the world in having religion as so powerful a force in society).
Note that most of the countries listed in the article - Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland - are highly developed, very relatively wealthy in the world, and generally strongly favour social equality and social welfare programs (can't speak for the current state of the Czech Republic, or Switzerland's health care system). Being poor in most of these countries, though uncomfortable, is not the huge and frightening burden it would be in a country like, er, Libya. Nor is it as culturally acceptable for the rich to flaunt stretch Hummers as it is in some other states.
The article's writers seriously skewed their sample, I would say. Religion may get extinct? In those cherry-picked countries, maybe. Globally - you have to end poverty first.