All other things being equal I'd expect it to reach an equilibrium. I don't think all other things are equal in this case, and nonbelief becomes more attractive over time (for better or worse).
[1] argues that pro-religion alleles are likely to become more common over time, since in the contemporary world religious people tend to have more children than the non-religious on average
It seems unlikely there is any single "God gene". Rather, certain personality traits (such as agreeableness) increase the likelihood of a person accepting religion, and genetics contributes to those traits, which in turn indirectly contributes to religiosity
I see this quoted a lot, but I don't think it's true:
+ There are plenty of places (and with a significant population) outside the western world that are quite secular and have become more secular in the past decades + There are places in the West that have become more religious. If by "Western" you mean just "Western Europe", then, yeah, that's a specially secular place but it's also a tiny place in both population and area.
China, Japan and South Korea are quite secular in many ways. A big chunk of Latin America is now quite secular too. You already have ~1.5B people fairly secular people that are non western.
On the other hand, countries like Poland or Hungary (which I'm guessing we would classify as Western) are becoming more religious.
That is not true. Where did you get that idea?
Which would those be? Are you talking about stuff like the rise of astrology and numerology in the US?
Secularization within formally religious groups is progressing much faster than change in demographics.
Politics is polarising along lines of religious identity, yes, but increasing religious behaviour? Going to temples more, donating more of their incomes?
Are you sure?
It's the Amish and Mennonites that seem to retain people well by having it be optional.
America is more likely to be Amish than anything else if we got solely by the trend.
I'd say there is a lot more too it than that
Both groups have many instances of rape happening that much of the wider world is not aware of, as they are cloistered societies, so, combined with the fact that many stay silent due to fear of retaliation, those are not the best examples to use.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-48265703
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/19/797804404/investigation-into-...
For various reasons Muslim population in france grew form basically 0% to ~10% in 50 years, in the same time the number of baptisms was divided by 2
> Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it Genesis 1:28
In Orthodox Judaism (from the Mishna/Talmud) this takes the status of a commandment to try to have kids.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the sons of one’s youth.
Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them.
Ps. 127:3-5
Is this not just due to the immigrant effect, ie the only ones who can afford to immigrate (legally, at least) are those who are relatively rich (which correlates with high education levels) in their countries? It takes money to shore up a visa and buy a plane ticket, that most individuals in poorer countries would not be able to afford. American Hindus (including Indians), East Asians etc are also more affluent and highly educated than the average American, for the same reasons.
I am not sure what immigration policy was like for Arabs.
And my dad came to the US for college from Pakistan, also with basically nothing--his family did not have much money.
But yes, I suppose there is literally the trip across the ocean that costs money.
How much of his religion and culture survived down to your generation of the family tree?
I’m really sorry to say this, but sometimes the way that Pakistanis have treated me with my background, I regret learning Urdu and Punjabi sometimes. I have many wonderful Sunni relatives and Pakistani friends but why should I put any kids I might have through abuse like “han pato Qadiani” “yahudion ka chamcha” and “wajibul qatl” (the last of which another American born Pakistani sipping soda water kindly informed me in a bar my parents were the week after the ‘Muslim ban’) Like Bulleh Shah is cool and all but mostly I end up talking about that stuff with Sikhs for some reason.
My father and brother don’t speak the language, only my mom and I. In the 80s, my mom’s favorite author was the late Ishtiaq Ahmad, up until she encountered some of his interesting conspiracy theories about her community. In children’s novels!
Also don’t forget that many East Asians came here as laborers and railroad workers in the 1800s and early 20th century, and as refugees in the 1950s-1980s. Third generation California Chinese, or Vietnamese, are also more affluent than white Americans today, for reasons that have nothing to do with immigration of affluent individuals.
2. explicit rejection is not quite the same as not following all things in common practice of the religion.
I know people classed as Christians who do not at any rate follow the whole be fruitful and multiply guidance.
2. Right, most people do not follow this in practice even if such commands appear in their religious scriptures. You might remember that the whole point of the comparison was my contention that we can expect something similar to happen with Muslims.
It is one thing to hear go do this constantly from the pulpit (hence my reference to fundamentalist Christianity which often does this) and decide as an individual not to go do it, it is another thing to never hear it pushed from the pulpit, read it in the book, and not care.
This goes back to my statement
> I certainly believe fundamentalist Christians are into this thing but not sure what percentage of each set [Christian, Muslim] has this as a core tenet.
by core tenet I do not mean something written in your text and agreed that this is an important part, but something that is hammered on all the time.
What does "is hammered on all the time" mean?
If a priest spends lots of time saying that people should go out and have children and find other Christians to marry to make a Christian nation I would consider that really hammering the issue.
IF they don't then that church doesn't care.
If pretty much none of the leaders of that denomination do so then I would say it is not a core tenet of the denomination.
So the question is if it is a core tenet of Muslim denominations? Which I don't know how many there are of that, I get the feeling they are in some ways much less fractured but perhaps in other ways it might be they are more fractured in belief systems than the large set of peoples normally called "Christian"
If however it is a core tenet then my belief is that core tenets do not change in a single generation, I would think several generations would need to happen before the religious leaders were not saying it all the time and the followers were thus not feeling obligated to follow. Sure in three generations I would expect alignment with other groups, by and large.
This belief of mine is however only a belief as I am not aware of any kind of large scale study in memetics or (perhaps to get away from a loaded term) idea transmission in multi-generational hierarchical organizations which is what a religion would be.
I am also willing to believe I am totally wrong here - for example if one found a religion that went from salvation by works to salvation by faith alone in one generation among a large Christian denomination then I would say - huh, I am definitely wrong and it means large scale hierarchical organizations / religions can be changed in one generation (although I would expect to see charismatic leadership involved now that I am considering the idea)
Probably contraception availability also plays a role there, but I'd be surprised if the two don't go hand in hand: if you have money to spend on healthcare then you'll also have the money for cheap contraceptives.
Edit: another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37720354) linked to a video by the author of the book that I read the above claim in: https://youtu.be/2LyzBoHo5EI?t=962 (the conclusion is what I linked, about 1 minute of watch time)
Contraception is forbidden by the Catholic Church.
I'm a Sunni Muslim who is fairly well-versed in the religion, and I can tell you it isn't an "obligation". Marriage is strongly encouraged, but usually without mention of children, though that's generally expected (probably more from a cultural angle). Islam is also generally (to my knowledge) accepting of contraception.
I have no doubt that American Muslims have more kids than the average American, but it's becoming increasingly common to see Muslim couples now with no kids (wasn't the case when I was a kid). Nobody thinks much of it.
(Above applies to Sunni Islam, can't speak for Shi'a denominations)
By contrast, I feel like most American Christians wouldn’t react that negatively to someone in their family declaring they don’t want kids.
That depends on whom you ask, as those who are as culturally (or actually) religious as your Muslim friends and family would react the same way to someone in their family declaring they don't want kids. In other words, it is likely just you not realizing many American Christians' lived experience, as that is not your own lived experience. I see a similar phenomenon with my Indian family thinking that Americans are more cavalier and distant with their children and that Indians treat them better, when in reality they simply don't know the lives of many other Americans.
My Bangladeshi parents said something similar: “Americans don’t love their kids.” And while that characterization isn’t quite true, I’m married into an American family, and the stereotype does have a factual underpinning. That’s how the manifestations of individualism—particularly among WASPs—is perceived by south Asians.
Exactly, it's a cultural thing, not a religious one. See, for example, how a lot of Hindu Indian parents would react similarly.
The same is true for secular Americans. As an outsider, it’s quite obviously an outgrowth of mainline Protestant Christianity.
While too many religious people let their cultural and other beliefs/values contaminate their religious practice, it is still pretty simple to draw a line, and it's silly to try to infer something about a religious group based on the attitudes of your irreligious parents.
As a couple of us have pointed out, the same attitudes are exhibited by non-Muslim South Asians, so why are you still asserting their views reflect some vestige of their ancestral religion as opposed to the culture they come from?
Asia offers a good example of how religion makes a difference. The whole area has been the subject of extensive population control efforts. But the Muslim fertility rate in India is markedly higher than the Hindu rate. And the fertility rate for Indian Buddhists is much lower than either, and closer to East Asian countries with a strong Buddhist tradition.
Citation needed, they've been converging for a while now.
Sunni Islam is very diverse. I am sure there are many millions of Muslims out there who would agree with everything you said. But there are other Sunnis who disagree. Here are some quotes from the Salafist website IslamQA:
"it is permissible to temporarily stop having children, with the aim of spacing pregnancies or stopping them for a specific length of time, if there is a legitimate shar‘i need for that, according to the view of both spouses with mutual consultation and agreement, on condition that this will not lead to any harm..." (my emphasis) [0]
"If the decision to delay having children is widespread, at the societal, national or ummah-wide level, then in this case it becomes a destructive and negative choice, and in that case the ruling is that it is not allowed, because it has moved from being a permissible and natural matter to one that is imposed from without and will lead to negative consequences, and is therefore blameworthy" (my emphasis) [1]
"...having children is a right of both spouses, and it is not permissible for one of them to refuse with no excuse or good reason" [1]
"If the motive for delaying having children, or ceasing to do so, is to follow the cultural norms of non-Muslims and imitate them blindly, out of admiration for their culture and infatuation with their way of life, then undoubtedly the ruling in this case is that it is not allowed" [1]
IslamQA does say "not one of the scholars said that it is obligatory for a couple to produce children" [1] - however, read in the context of the rest of what they say, that seems to mean that couples who have no children despite wanting to have them commit no sin - not that being "childfree by choice" is acceptable in Salafi Islam.
My impression is that IslamQA's position on this the standard Salafi position. If some segments of Islam – such as the Salafis – view having children as highly encouraged, even quasi-obligatory, then (all else being equal) those segments of Islam are going to grow faster than segments of Islam who view having children as entirely optional.
[0] https://islamqa.info/en/answers/144543/ruling-on-delaying-ha...
[1] https://islamqa.info/en/answers/231777/is-contraception-hara...
In any event, Salafis do not constitute a majority of Sunni Muslims (by far), and Sunni Islam is not a religious system that includes a clergy. Nothing on websites like IslamQA binds anyone, and people who identify as "Salafi" do not automatically or necessarily adhere to rulings in the way you seem to imagine.
And as you note, even the "scholars" and other content creators on that site, try as they might, in the end must admit it is not obligatory.
> If some segments of Islam – such as the Salafis – view having children as highly encouraged, even quasi-obligatory, then (all else being equal) those segments of Islam are going to grow faster than segments of Islam who view having children as more optional.
Leaving aside whether that's actually the case, this was not the original claim that was being disputed. The original issue was whether getting married and having kids is obligatory for Muslims, a requirement of their religion like ritual prayer, fasting during Ramadan, etc. It isn't.
True, but they have a lot of influence. I'm not Muslim, but my uncle (by marriage) is. My uncle has never really been the mosque-going type, but his father was. I remember his father complaining that the Salafis had taken over his mosque, using all their Saudi money. And I don't think his experience was particularly atypical.
Also, I don't think this is unique to Salafism. [0] repeats basically the same point of view (contraception is permissible to delay having children, but not to prevent it entirely). That's not a Salafi website, that's a website aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood – the Brotherhood are not Salafi, they represent an Islamism which is more traditional in its scholarship than the Salafis are
[0] https://fiqh.islamonline.net/en/contraception-permissible/
> and Sunni Islam is not a religious system that includes a clergy.
Whether that's true depends on how you define "clergy". Sunni imams or ulama are just as much "clergy" as Jewish Rabbis or Baptist ministers are. The claim that Sunni Islam lacks "clergy" relies on defining "clergy" in a narrow sense inspired by Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and "high church" Protestantism, and ignoring the broader sense in which the term also gets applied to Judaism and "low church" Protestantism, among others.
> and people who identify as "Salafi" do not automatically or necessarily adhere to rulings in the way you seem to imagine
I'm Catholic–how many Catholics do you think follow the Catholic Church's teaching that most forms of contraception are prohibited? So I was never making the assumption you are assuming I'm making
> The original issue was whether getting married and having kids is obligatory for Muslims, a requirement of their religion like ritual prayer, fasting during Ramadan, etc
In a strict sense, you are right – all Sunni ulama agree that marriage and children are mustaḥabb (recommended/encouraged) not fard (obligatory). However, I think it is more complex than that for two reasons (a) in some Muslim subcultures, certain things which are officially just recommended/encouraged become de facto obligatory, not necessarily due to the letter of religious teachings, but due to social pressures which exist in those religious communities; (b) something which is only mustaḥabb in the general case can become fard in specific cases, and certainly you will find ulama who think that sometimes happens in the matter under discussion, and if the specific cases become broad enough, they can end up outweighing the general case in practice
But it is beyond encouraged. Any faithful Muslim believe that marriage is half of faith.
“When a person gets married he has completed half of his religion, so let him fear Allah with regard to the other half.”
https://islamqa.info/en/answers/11586/is-marriage-half-of-re...
Are you Muslim? You realize people don't take "half of faith" literally, right?
Vague, non-specific, evidence-free comments in highly sensitive areas lead to all sorts of bad stuff.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/06/why-musli...
However, that's not really a correlation, which is important: For example, I'd guess that people who are Muslim (an incredibly large, diverse set of people) on average buy fewer winter coats than people who are Shinto. That tells us nothing about the religion of Islam, other than some geography.
Which, BTW, live close to the centre of Global Warming's bullseye.
We might need to add extra variables on such forecasts.
Religious populations out reproducing non religious is a real thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Judaism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasidic_Judaism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Orthodox_Judaism
I think the general point you're making probably still stands, but I think the distinction is more than merely pedantic.
In the west, increase in secularity has only affected the groups of people who would've been nominally religious (i.e. religious in name only). People who attend religious services on a weekly basis (a much better measure of religiosity) has stayed consistent. This is still a notable shift in religious demographic, just not the kind your portraying.
Further, outside the west, much of the world has kept or has increased their religiosity as they modernized. The belief that modernism produces secularism was abandoned by sociologists of religion some time ago after it was evidentially false (E.g. India is the most religious country in the world and still a modern state).
The fact you can't see value in religious systems adhered to by billions of people over thousands of years speaks less to those systems than your lack of understanding them.
False: It was 50% in the US 70 years ago. It's about 30% now. This is a decline of 20% in absolute terms, or a 40% decline in relative terms.
Weekly church attendance is under 15% in basically all of Western Europe -- https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/how-religiou... (note that this show US attendance at 36%, but it's also comprised of data 6-15 years old).
> The fact you can't see value in religious systems adhered to by billions of people over thousands of years speaks less to those systems than your lack of understanding them.
Plenty of things were done by huge fractions of the world population for thousands of years that deserve questioning. Authoritarianism; oppression of minorities and women; routine warfare with neighboring groups; belief in witch doctors, etc. This line of argument isn't a very good one.
10% of Germans claim to go to church every week? I've got friends, relatives, and acquaintances all over the country and of all age groups, and I don't know a single person who would even remotely qualify. That's at least a hundred people. Plugging that into the PMF of the binomial distribution gives me a likelihood so minuscule I should consider buying a lottery ticket. I call bullshit. That research is bunk.
Even the churches themselves only claim their weekly attendance is about 3.3m[1] - that doesn't even mean the same attendees every week.
It follows that the actual number must be below 4%.
[1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gottesdienste-laaaangweilig-1...
My intent is neither. It's merely tangential.
Depending on which part of the pizza you take, it's not going to have any pepperoni. In other words, if you intentionally take a non-representative sample, unsurprisingly your sample is not going to be representative. I don't really see the point you're trying to make.
10% of Germans cannot be weekly churchgoers when there's at most ~4 million weekly attendees overall. It's obviously impossible. A number lower than 5%, preferably ~1-2%, I can easily square away with that number and my own, not intentionally cherry-picked, sample.
My point is: you seem to have grown up in a very church-removed part of the country (if I had to guess either big city or east Germany). That is where your biased sample comes from. It’s most certainly not representative, and if you claim it to be just because you don’t sub select, then you are at best ignorant and at worst intentionally dishonest ;)
Currently I live in Berlin - I don't think the situation in the northeast needs explaining.
Is your point that I must be wrong and that ~4 million weekly attendees in fact means 10% of Germans do attend church weekly? Cause if that's the kind of mathematics we're doing this conversation is pointless.
> I've got friends, relatives, and acquaintances all over the country and of all age groups, and I don't know a single person who would even remotely qualify. That's at least a hundred people.
that basis is what I objected to. I never made a claim to the actual numbers. There I'd tentatively agree with you, in that I'd suspect, that it is less than 10% of the population that goes to church on a weekly basis. But that's a "if you force me to pick" statement not something that I'd put high stakes in. Especially since the link that you reacted to is for data from 2008 to 2017. And... back in 2008 I'd not be surprised _at all_ if >10% would have gone to church weekly.. And yes we can quibble about whether missing church a couple of weeks per year should still allow yourself to count as "goes to church weekly" and whatever. I really don't care about the particular number. I care (or really was triggered momentarily and hit the reply button ;)) about your assertion that the 10% number _must_ be wrong, _because_ you yourself don't know "a single person that _remotely_ qualifies". (which given your place of origin I also doubt, but whatever)
Many of those groups (1) have high birth rates (large families starting at a young age), (2) have high retention rates (>80%, sometimes even >90%) generation after generation. There is no good reason to suppose that (1) or (2) are going to stop any time soon, and even they do for some of them, they are unlikely to do so for all.
I don't think we should expect these groups to follow the same secularising trajectory as mainstream religion. These groups have evolved a cultural immunity to the temptation of defecting to secular modernity which the religious mainstream failed to evolve.
France is modern. So is the USA, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Singapore, Canada, and others.
But India?
I was born in India, grew up in the US, and remember many visits back to the motherland where a relative would extol the virtues of “coming back”. I also remember getting sick all the time, abhorrent public restrooms, sitting in traffic for hours, etc.
Anyone from an actual modern country would agree with you on this, but many Indians living in India would not.
The potential problem is: you've spent a big chunk of your adult life living in a developed nation, and despite your massively enhanced purchasing power, you are returning to a developing one, with all the concomitant physical discomforts and social ills.
But social ills are only a problem if you acknowledge them, and physical discomforts are largely solved with a money bubble, so... there we are.
It’s more expensive to live in a non-developed country than a developed one. Now a close to developed country might be an interesting choice since the prices are still low but the quality is fairly similar.
Having spent more time of my life in more developed countries, I find that a lot of little behaviors that are normal back in India really grate on me which aren't as big of a thing in, say, the US.
Basic things like behavior on public transport, over in the US you can generally seem to rely on people standing to the sides of the door in a rough line until people have stepped off, while in India you have to push your way through the crowd trying to push its way in. It's hard to get used to those sorts of things, and many of them aren't meaningfully addressed by simply being wealthy (since similar behaviors carry over to, say, shopping).
Plus, it's even worse for women, who really can't just not acknowledge social ills in India as they can have a significant influence on their safety.
They do seem to be improving on the infra. front. But compared to China, they are walking with a turtle’s speed.
Have you been to India? It's a wonderful, fascinating place but it is emphatically not a modern, developed nation the way France or Japan is.
Everybody likes to imagine their woo is special, but it's not. As humanity slowly drags itself out of the nasty, brutish, and short natural way of things, we lose the need for primitive beliefs.
Which one is more fit to the environment?
If people don't find anything else worthy of worship, then they simply worship themselves.
Proof for that? I don't deny is has been a big part of much of human existence over the millennia, but there's zero evidence it's a necessary part of our very being.
I think the identity will remain but the substance will change.
There are some really cool discussions on YouTube about the definition of God and the nature of consciousness that are quite compelling and unifying.
It follows that Christianity evolved into its current form from the NT as its starting point.
Further evolutions and shifts should be expected (though some of them may look like explorations of very ancient paths not taken, like a drift away from inerrantist literalism and back towards things like Origen's opinion that the NT writers may well have made factual errors).
Honestly... I've simply not seen this. There are many religious people in prominent positions, you just don't know about it. In my fairly traditional catholic parish, we have families where mom and dad are catholic, their five kids are catholic, and their 40 + grandchildren are as well (some are now adults and having kids of their own). And all successful, doctors, nurses, engineers, etc. The idea that religious == stupid or baggage or whatever is simply at odds with history. You're conflating the Duggars with otherwise normal people that just have different views.
Oh, I see, ignore the data and instead believe in your hidden truth. Got it. Thanks for the help, all this time I've been going around making reasonable conclusions based on evidence, like an idiot.
"In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace" https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decli...
"Religion and Congregations in a Time of Social and Political Upheaval" https://www.prri.org/research/religion-and-congregations-in-...
"U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time" https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-...
On the other hand, left liberal indoctrination works fine in US right now, as we can see. Same with imperial indoctrination in today's Russia.
If you look at all religions ("a belief in something absent evidence"), religiosity hasn't moved an inch.
What's going to be really interesting are the intersection between these two populations -- At some point some heavy breeding religious people are going to realize that as good as their heavy birthrate strategy is a heavy birthrate strategy combined with the technological advances I describe above is even better.
Imagine a near future where some ambitious and forward thinking Mennonites/Hutterites/Doukhobors/Amish are pumping out legions of productive, obedient and consistent workers in rural North America while urban and educated urban dwellers waste their time and economic opportunities away while being terminally online and outraged to the point that the economic and political balance of power shifts to these rural groups.
Artificial wombs don't change this. Embryo selection doesn't change this. Vaccines will increase the chances that whatever children are produced survive to adulthood, but childhood mortality from vaccine-preventable illness isn't high enough to compensate for a worldview that doesn't want to have children.
If you believe you're part of something much more significant than yourself, dedicating your life to moving it forward by producing other people who will outlive you and do the same makes sense. But if you're all that matters? If your scorecard is measures in dollars or followers or something else that dies with you? You don't have kids even if you do have access to artificial wombs.
This sounds like a strawman. Many people don't want to have kids for different kinds of reasons (personal objectives, couple style of life, they don't like kids, etc). You seem to have a very low opinion of people that don't want to have kids and, on the other hand, a very high opinion of people that do have kids.
The personal objectives, the lifestyle, or the dislike of children, are all primarily self-referential. What do I want? How do I like living? Who do I want to be around? Those do all die with you.
People who prioritize any of those are highly unlikely to have children, regardless of the availability of artificial wombs.
I would certainly rather people be honest about the situation if they are at the center of their own reality. Better to admit that and not have children than bring children into it to try to fool people.
I don't even judge them for it. Our whole world is geared toward fostering that mentality. It would be hard not to be.
I'm just saying it doesn't lead to parenting a replacement number of children like believing you're contributing to something vastly greater than yourself does.
I expect this to have pretty large effects,though predicting what those will be seems difficult.