If you look here [2], you can see that the USA is more on the religious end of the religion curve in terms of Western countries. You can also see a trend linking uncertainty, inequality, and religiosity.
[1] https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/religious...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligio...
While most people in Germany formally belong to some Christian church or are Muslim or Jewish, in a lot of cases that does not extend past the entry on some registration form.
Look for example at [0] whose headline states: "Believe is irrelevant to majority of Germans".
[0] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschlandtrend-821.html
Your link belies what you said. That survey was not in "every western country", but fifteen western countries. The Czech Republic is west of Finland (surveyed) and less than 20% of its population is religious.
Also you say from that survey people believe in God or a higher power, but it does not limit to that, they include people who believe in a spiritual force. That could be a Buddhist.
A higher power could also be an omnipresent intelligence with no interest what so ever in human affairs.
In my opinion the whole debate should be using a terminology regarding spiritual awareness and not of religion since the latter is much more loaded with assumptions which biases the results. This way an atheist could actively be pursuing a personal spiritual program.
Are you saying that people who don't believe in advanced alien tech also do not believe in God? Or am I having a mental breakdown? I'm fairly sure I know what a subset is and its logical implications.
To go from there to ((English ("X does not believe in a higher power")) logically implies (English ("X does not believe in God"))) is trivial. And that is the definition of a subset A of B: \forall x \in A, x \in B
e.g.
https://humanism.org.uk/2019/08/29/more-people-opting-for-no...
And a religious wedding or funeral just informs us about your relatives not about the UK.
Same for weddings - I can't think of any wedding I have attended where it wasn't very clear that the style of the wedding was determined by the people getting married.
I think people don't generally talk about religion in the UK because it is pretty irrelevant to most of the population.
> Always an excellent idea to start off a study with an attempt to prove a preconceived point.
That's highly disingenuous.
The intention as stated was to disprove a preconceived point -- viz 'societies that don't believe in God are doomed'.
Always an excellent idea to start off a study with an attempt to prove a preconceived point.
> Religion is highly variable, and therefore we need to ask why is it sometimes popular and why it isn't," Paul said. "One thing we do know is that it's only popular in societies that … have enough rate of dysfunction that people are anxious about their daily lives, so they're looking to the gods for help in their daily lives.
A supermajority of people in every western country believe in god or some higher power: https://www.pewforum.org/2018/05/29/beliefs-about-god/pf_05-...
No Western European country has more than 20% atheists: https://www-pewresearch-org.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/www.pewre.... France is 15%, Germany is 10%. The US is 4%. People in developed countries are much less likely to participate in organized religion or subscribe to some general idea of spirituality, but atheists are still a small share of the population.