Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

There's a great discourse in one of Dan Brown's books about whether people leave religion because they have found better answers elsewhere, or because they have stopped asking the questions.

Separately, I observed that that the areligious are much more likely to have few or no kids while the religious folks put a much greater emphasis on it. As the secular world moves towards a place where there's no pressure to marry and procreate at all, how long before it is once again relegated into a demographic minority?

View on HN

> how long before it is once again relegated into a demographic minority?

Many children of religious people are areligous, which is a primary reason how we got to < 50% church membership in the first place.

There was a religious leader making a similar argument some time back, but I don't think it holds together all that well. After all, back in the middle ages the amount of churchgoing people was near 100% and religions were promoting big families then just as much as now. So if religious parents "out-produce" their non-religious counterparts how did we ever get to the current situation where a majority is not religious?

The answer is of course that children choose their own way and don't stay religious just because of their parents.

It could be because contraception didn’t exist in the Middle Ages.

From basic evolutionary biology, there is no universall "fitness", only situational fitness. In the middle ages, in a world without contraception, with extreme pressures to marriage, without pornography or any other non-intercourse sexual releases, being religious or not matters little in fertility rate. Although in frankness, it still did, that's how rome became christian in the first place, Christians married later (so had higher chances of survival), and treasured their baby girls instead of exposing them to death, small fertility advantages added up expontentially over time.

In the 21st age, the environment has shifted so much against irreligious/low commitment people in terms of reproductive fitness, due to those above factors heavily selecting against them. Literally only religious people, no matter what part of the world you are looking at, are able to maintain above replacement fertility. Irreligious people' population decline, in the long run, at least 25% every generation, will be far faster than they can "convert" religious people. Look at the amish and mormon fertility rates, read decades of research by Eric Kaufmann, and the answer is rather self evident

> how long before it is once again relegated into a demographic minority?

2-3 more generations to go I suspect based on personal experience where it'll be less than 10%.

My grandparents were religious and my grandma prior to covid hadn't missed weekly service her whole life.

My parents were "partial" religious meaning they went to major events and still have an identity linked to their religion.

I grew up in a religious environment. Decided that belief and faith system wasn't for me in my teenage years and once on my own became an atheist.

My wife and I will raise our children without it being in a religious environment.

If you take away the "god" element, and adopt a Nietschze approach to religion/culture, i.e. its utility over generations, and where it ends up.

Then areligious would seem to be a pretty useless offshoot, if its always doomed to die out.

Perhaps a third state exists, with purpose and optimism to bring children into the world, but not born out of abrahamic religions.

I think that areligious is not a state in itself but a void to be filled. There are secular truths or causes that people adopt and follow with the same passion as those that follow religion.

There’s out- and inflow, too ((children of) the religious becoming areligious and vice-versa).

I expect those to more than compensate for the religious having more kids, on average.

I'm tempted to think that the correlation isn't religion per se, but rather a pragmatic attitude towards the 7b people on the planet today.

If you're reasonably 'rational' (but not especially religious) you're not going to look at those numbers and think procreation is compelling for the sake of keeping the tribe alive.

OTOH if you're thinking that your particular religion needs a numbers boost, then the imperative may feel differently.

"religiousness" is not likely to be an inheritable genetic trait, so the children of a religious person may or may not be religious themselves, and vice-versa. The overall culture is likely to have a more powerful impact on this than solely parenting.

You don't think that the children of religious parents are more likely to be religious than children of atheists?

Because of genetics or the fact that they were raised by religious parents?

Of course they are, but the more important point is whether out of 100 children of religious parents, 0 or 10 or 90 or 100 are likely to be atheists themselves.

I would expect that in most secular cultures you'll see something like, say, 60/100 children of religious parents becoming atheists, and 90/100 for children of atheist parents.

These kinds of dynamics would still mean that overall, even if religious people are having more children than atheists, the population is still growing more atheist with each generation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com