A friend linked me to this article from Spiegel International about academics who study secular people. The article doesn’t complete the circle, but the dots are right there to be connected. And they make clear that nothing we’ve discussed here on LOOG for the past several weeks is as important as the gay-muppets-on-Sesame-Street posts upon the front page right now.
There are some very strange looking statistics in the Spiegel article, particularly about emptying churches. I don’t observe churches with empty parking lots on Sundays. Possibly the strangest statistic is this one: “In a survey conducted by the Protestant Church in Germany, 3 percent of Protestants admitted that they did not believe in God.” It would seem that by definition, a Protestant would have to believe in God. Are these closeted atheists, still attending church because of peer pressure?
The example of Germany also brings up another interesting issue — what happens to religion when separation of church and state is weakened, in religion’s favor. It isn’t good for religion:
Many former Christians name Germany’s church tax — an automatic levy of 8 to 9 percent of a person’s total income tax that is managed by local government tax offices and applied to all members of the Catholic and Protestant churches — as a reason for leaving.
On the one hand, this seems like a remarkably shallow reason for abandoning belief, but that isn’t quite what the article says is going on. It says they’ve left their churches and register as unaffiliated or “none” with regard to their religion. That doesn’t mean they don’t believe, it means they aren’t willing to pay 8 to 9 percent of their income for the privilege of saying they believe. A few years ago when I traveled to Germany, I met people just like that — they say they really believed but didn’t want to pay the tax. Of course, it’s nothing new, in Germany or anywhere else, to distinguish between attendance at church and actual belief.
The last insight may be the most penetrating:
“Humans have two cognitive styles,” [Boston University’s Catherine Caldwell-Harris] says. “One type finds deeper meaning in everything; even bad weather can be framed as fate. The other type is neurologically predisposed to be skeptical, and they don’t put much weight in beliefs and agency detection.”
If there is substance to this thought, it may go a long way to explain why theists and skeptics seem to spend so much time arguing past each other, growing frustrated at how the other cannot see or understand what seem to them to be blindingly obvious facets of the discussion. Now, it could be a chicken-and-egg issue; why does one group of people seek deeper meaning to events and the other group have a tendency to eschew agency explanations?
A significant portion of that answer, I think, is raised earlier in the article and shown in the graphic:
The former West, which had always had freedom of religion since the end of the War, maintained a thriving religious culture and people pass their religious beliefs on to their children. For three generations, religion was prohibited in the GDR. After unification, more liberal rules, permitting freedom of worship, prevailed in those areas. But people have not returned to religion there in large numbers; they were raised without religion and for the most part do not see it as either necessary or desirable and consequently do not embrace it.
You learn your appetite for supernatural agency — to look for God, or not — from the circumstances of your upbringing. If you are raised in a religious environment, secularism seems alien and weird to you. Similarly, those raised in a secular environment think of religion as the abberration.
It’s easy enough to feel that phenomenon within yourself — consider your attitudes towards a religious belief you do not share. Most Readers here are from nations tracing their cultural roots back to Europe; Aztec mythology is pretty far removed from all of our cultural backgrounds and it seems patently obvious that Quezacoatl is not worthy of serious worship. Of course, to Aztecs of the era we call the fifteenth century, it was patently obvious that failing to worship Quezacoatl was a serious moral error, with tangible consequences for self and for community. Why is Quezacoatl not worshiped any more? The worship of Quezacoatl was prohibited and Christianity was imposed in its place. The descendents of the Aztecs are now the products a thoroughly Christian culture; they have had the religion of their ancestors stripped from them and embrace a new culture in the place of the old one.
We find religion, or not, based upon preferences forged in our childhood. Religion is culture. Culture is malleable. And it is transmitted most powerfully by way of the socialization of children. This isn’t quite the same thing as being taught religion by one’s parents, although that obviously is a part of it in a typical child’s upbringing. It is, however, to say that by the time a child is in her teen years, the die is already cast as far as she’s concerned. The culture war is for the hearts and minds of the next generation, not for the warriors themselves.
I find this quote fascinating:
““Humans have two cognitive styles,” [Boston University’s Catherine Caldwell-Harris] says. “One type finds deeper meaning in everything; even bad weather can be framed as fate. The other type is neurologically predisposed to be skeptical, and they don’t put much weight in beliefs and agency detection.”
I have noted in my own life experience (please note here that I am already acknowledging this is anecdotal and based on entirely on personal observation) that people who believe in God tend to believe in other supernatural phenomena at a rate parallel to the strength of faith in literal readings of religious text.
For example, the fundamentalist Christians I know – whom I would think would reject alien life due to their rigidity of Genesis cosmology – seem to have the strongest belief not only in UFOs, but in complicated UFO mythologies completely unrelated to and at odds with their Christianity. Those that argue the strongest that my life is entirely free because it exists for no reason except to see if I will choose Jesus are one’s most likely to argue that I can’t escape the predestination of the astrological predictions I read in the paper. Also, American religious fundamentalism sometimes seems to go hand in hand with highly dubious sounding conspiracy theories.
Again, this may all be wrong, and a result of my faulty observation. I wonder what study has been done on this in any. I try to google, but any groups oaf words I try using sends me links to things that have nothing to do with my query. (Example, videos of people debated evolution vs. creationism, or Harry Potter is bad for kid controversies.)
In any case, I’ve wondered for a long time if my inability to believe and my friend’s inability to comprehend non belief aren’t somehow hardwired.
There’s lots of lit on this. Do you have access to an academic library?
Was his to me or Burt? Of me, yes, but not in a convenient fashion.
No. I have access to the internet and Westlaw. There are days (today is one of them) that I long for the life of an academic. Other days, not so much (the days when I realize they have a lot of bu!!$hit to put up with, too). Most of the time, having smart people to dialogue with is sufficient.
Why is Quezacoatl not worshiped any more?
Too hard to spell. Even Cthulhu is on the edge of that.
They’re both spelled just like they sound, dude.
Interesting piece but I’m not sure you’ve got the whole picture.
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Where do the very many of us who had religious upbringings and were religious for a time but then became atheist/agnostic fit in?
I suspect — the article does not say — that within that group there are several sub-groups. Perhaps you were like me, raised in a loving household with a good bond with your parents, parents who went through the motions of religion to please their own parents but did not dwell overmuch on the trappings of ritual so much as they did their best to teach good morality. When returning at an older age to revisit the issue of the supernatural, you found, as I did, that the ancient teachings make little sense in today’s world, and their value is for cultural background and as one of many possible vehicles for transmittal of ethics to the young. Thus, if you are like me, you discarded the purported truths of religion and now do what you can to live your life well and on its own terms.
Or perhaps you were raised in a household where religion, doctrine, orthodoxy, dogma, and holy texts were the meat and breath of daily life, and for some reason you rebelled and rejected those things. Maybe you had a bad relationship with your parents or some other authority figure, or maybe you came to realize that they meant well but were misguided and decided to reject their ways and make one of your own. It seems to me that most such stories have a villanious figure in them of some sort; if so, I hope the villany was not so awful and your life after freeing yourself from it has been as happy and as free from the vitriol of lingering resentment as is humanly possible.
Or maybe you have a different story to tell altogether. I’d welcome it if you wish to share.
My parents were/are very religious (old school Church of England). What changed my mind was access to the local public library which had a tiny zoology section and watching David Attenborough on TV.
The leader of a youth group I belonged to said that mental illness was possession by the devil, which gave me another push away from belief.
So there was no villainy, just science.