Do countries lose religion as they gain wealth? (2013)

> "...it's basically a psychological coping mechanism."

I think this isn't quite right. Religion is a social mechanism. It creates the right incentives for its members to buy into a kind of insurance program. When a member falls on hard times the other members will take care of them. Of course this is more appealing to people in financially or socially unstable circumstances.

In order to avoid free-loading, there might be something like a tithe where you actually have to pay money into a shared pool. But if you don't have money to spare then usually membership comes down to costly signalling, i.e. various forms of self-sacrifice. Usually the poorer the members the more extreme the religion.

The idea of divine, absolute laws of conduct and an un-gameable entity that enforces these laws sounds fantastical but it's very effective at getting people to cooperate once they've bought in (which is why costly signals of buy-in are so important). It shifts the prisoner's dilemma payouts away from defect, toward cooperate. And a strange quirk of the human mind is that the more socially useful something is, the more it will prevent us from realizing it's not actually based on something true, and the more socially harmful it is the more it will prevent us from realizing it's actually true.

As society modernizes, people move away from religion because the costs don't seem to justify the benefits. Also without strong social incentives to believe, it becomes too hard to believe based only on the likelihood that it's actually true. Unfortunately I think we do lose something in the process. Modern society is more likely to be disconnected. Religiously active people generally tend to be happier. Looking around a lot of people I know have nothing like a weekly church meeting where they can socialize with a group of people that takes care of each other.

My theory is that the church and priests have a giant fault at least for me an Orthodox Christian in Romania. When I was a child I become a super believer, they had a religios cartoon on the only TV channel and the stories were very nice. But then in school you have the priests(religion teachers) fight a losing battle against science by supporting the creation and myths instead on focusing on the more important parts.

I was also into conspiracies and aliens/UFOs and religion also makes sense as a tool to keep the poor suppressed So IMO when the priests were no longer the only source of education then the things collapse for the church, the people in my village are on paper part of the church but in practice based on what they do and not do the story is different. There are some different sects/versions that appeared after the revolution in 1989 that do a better job on converting and keeping their people more engaged but still are talking about the creation myths so this is invalidating some of my points( and I am still mystified how people that studied physics in university(including astronomy) will defend the Genesis as a correct historical thing).

Just so we don't start some mini comment war here, if you are a religious person I am fine with that and I am honestly happy for you, I never ever start discussion with people in the attempt to convert them, they start this conversations and I have to explain where my doubt come from. Also you don't need to try to defend creation her, it will not work and is not the main point for me anyway there are more deeper issues , philosophical issues that even a proof of God existence would not be enough for me to start woshiping him/it.

Looking at religion as a tool for the insecure (financially, emotionally, whatever) seems to miss the point, at least for the major religions. Buddhism answers the question "how do I deal with pain". Islam and Judaism answers the question "what does God expect from us" (at least that's what it seems to me from the outside). Christianity at its best answers the question "why am I here", to which the answer is that God made us like him to participate in his creation-project (see Gen 1). (Gen 3 shows how that got messed up, and the Gospels show how it got back on track.) More speculatively, it also seems like religion, at least some of theme, answers questions like "what is my place in the world", "how did we get here", "why does this exists", "how do I treat other people", which could maybe be broadly summarized "what is the meaning of life".

I don't think these questions are going away with wealth. Wealth doesn't answer the question of purpose or meaning, nor does it answer the question of why we desire connection with other people but we don't seem to be able to do it very well. I suspect the West is getting a lot of surrogate religions that just aren't called by that name, such as "changing the world!!"/activism as an answer for the meaning of life.

It seems to be missing a whole picture. I suspect places like Saudi Arabia, Israel, and UAE have both high average wealth and high religiosity. It highlights places like Bangladesh and Japan, but seems to note the US as an anomaly. Feels like it's cherry picking data to fit the story.

It would be nice to just see a graph of all the data and see how well the data really correlates.

I have a strong feeling that it is not an either/or situation. In the ladder of unknown, if spirituality is the first step, religion is the final. And I am seeing a huge increase in spirituality in developed and wealthy countries. It is as if you drop the current one only to eventually create/adopt a new one. For all we know it could be a variant of science the way people are appealing to scientists as high priests. It seems to me that it is too complex a phenomenon to categorise based on the average proportion at any given point in time.

Adam Smith has this wonderful quote on why it is difficult to model humans and societies in the theory of moral sentiments, which I feel holds even today:

> The man of the system. seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society,every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it.

I think this is because churches provide services that governments in developing countries cannot. People there are more likely to be religious because churches provide value to them.

> Paul's intention in creating the scale was to challenge the idea that religion is universal and innate to the human condition, and to show that societies that don't believe in God are not doomed, as some religious conservatives would have people believe.

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.

Is this a serious question. Religion is only there to give hope to the hopeless. As countries gets wealthier, less hopeless people exists in that country, in turn less need for the religions. Who can say that I did not move a finger and god sent me all this wealth ? I mean other than the church charlatans. People wake up to the truth of "if I work more I get out of this poverty quicker" very simple premise if you think about it.

A point against religion but a point in favor for the truth of Jesus of Nazareth's words: "Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your comfort." (Luke 6:24)

What is "religiosity"?

If the measure of religiosity is "participation in religious services", are we even measuring the same thing when participation can vary all the way from watching Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker on TV, to being blessed by the Pope in the Vatican, to receiving alms from Mother Teresa on the streets of Calcutta, or completing a Scientology audit graduation on a Friday?

I know many (my friends) who are in the process of losing their religion as they move up the salary scale.

Religion, for many, is a hope to be saved from their economic misery. Once they are out of penury then religious obligations become a bane on the newly found freedom that comes with money so the fallout is obvious. The developed west is a proof of this phenomenon. Software engineers in India would confirm the hypothesis in the next decade or two.

This quote from Marx is often misrepresented but I think he said it in a positive sense,

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people"

The less uncertainty there is in your life, the less driven you are towards the comfort of simple answers to complex problems.

The fallacy that articles like this fall into is that they group all religions into a single group and treat them the same. There are many rich Muslims for example, and they don't feel the need to "lose their religion" after becoming rich. They know they will be asked how they spent their wealth on Judgement Day.

They don't, they just get new ones (climatism) or choose technocrats and state to replace priests (statism)

> "There's no situation where you have a really highly religious nation that's highly successful socially."

I guess it all depends on how you are defining 'religious'. Without Christianity, the West wouldn't have universities, hospitals and democracies. It also looks like the decline of Christianity in modern society leads to stagnation and mimesis.