Belief in Five Spiritual Entities Edges Down to New Lows
What this reflects is the trend that has been apparent in American religious belief since about the mid 1960's where the younger generation have tended to be significantly less religious than their parents with belief in God and the importance of religion tending to increase in older generations. However, as people age, they tend to keep the religious beliefs they formed by the age of about 25-30. What these charts show then is the effect of the older generations dying and the younger generations moving up through the age groups, as the following chart shows:
A UK survey in 2021 estimated the 'half-life' of religious belief in the USA to be down to 1 generation, i.e., churches lose 50% of their affiliates with each generation while the numbers converting from a non-believing upbringing are minuscule.
The other figures from this chart are entirely unremarkable since the link between poverty and a lack of higher education, and religiosity has been well established , in a vicious, self-sustaining cycle of low education --> low employment prospects/ low social mobility --> hyper-religiosity --> low education - which a cynic might think lies behind the Catholic Church's insistence on social policies that increase poverty.
By denying the right to family planning, which ties women into a lifetime of childbearing/child-raising and economic dependence on as single income, the Catholic Church perpetuates the social deprivation in which religions thrive. If you want people to subscribe to the idea of something better in a 'next life' it pays to make this life something you want to escape from, and a next-life look like a relief.
The link between political party affiliation is also well established since the Rupugnican Party effectively became the political wing of fundamentalist evangelical Protestantism.
This decline, if Europe is anything to go by, will be exponential, since the children of non-believers and unaffiliated tend to follow their parents with any movement tending to be towards disbelief, so the rate of decline accelerates with each generation. In the UK, where pre-World War II and in the immediate post-war period, belief in God and attendance at church or chapel were in the high percentages, they are now down to single figure percentage points and still declining. Churches which were filled every Sunday are now standing unused and derelict, but the Church still can't recruit enough priests to serve the remaining combined parishes.
Meanwhile, Atheism has become the largest single demographic in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, far in excess of the total of all religions combined and being religious is regarded as more than a little strange, even suspect - the preserve of street-corner ranters that people cross the road to avoid, lest they try to engage them in conversation about their invisible friend who talks to them.
Although the trend is good and the prospects for the USA look promising, it is still worrying that such a substantial proportion of adult still believe in the supernatural and so are open to exploitation by unscrupulous frauds in the form of 'Christian' evangelicals, right-wing white supremacists and creationist who spread scientific disinformation for money.
This book explains why faith is a fallacy and serves no useful purpose other than providing an excuse for pretending to know things that are unknown. It also explains how losing faith liberates former sufferers from fear, delusion and the control of others, freeing them to see the world in a different light, to recognise the injustices that religions cause and to accept people for who they are, not which group they happened to be born in. A society based on atheist, Humanist principles would be a less divided, more inclusive, more peaceful society and one more appreciative of the one opportunity that life gives us to enjoy and wonder at the world we live in.
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How did you come to be here, now? This books takes you from the Big Bang to the evolution of modern humans and the history of human cultures, showing that science is an adventure of discovery and a source of limitless wonder, giving us richer and more rewarding appreciation of the phenomenal privilege of merely being alive and able to begin to understand it all.
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