Why Religion Is Going Away

Religion is leaving us. It is quitely and politely walking out the back door. Though once the life of the human party, it now sulks, irrelevant and tragically incompetent, out the patio door.

Take a look here at a recent analysis which depicts the increasing proportion of people who don’t care about religion:

Sociology, as a science of human beliefs, can tell us why this is the case.

Humans “believe” things because they feel obvious. Beliefs really feel, from a subjective, individual’s point of view, more like observations. Beliefs have this taken-for-grantedness feel to them simply because others share them with us.

If person A is told by Person B that this guy Jesus died for their sins,  Person A holds this story in memory. However, if Person A then develops friendships (through everyday  random interaction, or perhaps through one’s parents) with Person C and Person D, both of whom are positive of the story of Jesus, Person A begins to see this story as a fact, as he comes to see it as a generally accepted (i.e., factual) aspect of the world around him.

People follow and adopt the beliefs, values and worldviews of others because they FEEL factual, and what is factual is what is “confirmed” in the accounts of others.

Now, as an aside, it was of course the Enlightenment which helped humanity ditch this abysmal method of developing beliefs. We know now that no matter how many people believe something, it doesn’t make it true. Why? Because there is an objective, stable, external world out there which we can measure. Beliefs do not determine truth, only measurment determines truth.

So as for whether or not Jesus died for our sins, the question is nonsensical through a scientific lense. Again, it is an issue of measurement, this time of the biology of life. If Jesus was ever a man, he must have been subject to the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. Did he rise from the dead to absolve our sins? Well, do the atoms which comprise the human body operate unimpeded after the electro-chemical activity of the body ceases? No, they do not and cannot. On the scientific account, spontaneous resurrection is fucking ridiculous.

But for everyday people, as opposed to scientists, facts are things confirmed by the beliefs of others.

Ok, but, importantly, for a religion to survive, its belief system must be transmitted to subsequent generations. Religions “survive” to the degree that they pass down a relatively coherent, intact doctrine to the next generation.

There is a kink in this process of generational transmission, though. Several good studies by the sociologist David Voas have revealed that when parents of different religious backgrounds marry, they tend to raise kids who ignore religion.

In other words, if two Catholic people marry and have 2 kids, there is a high probability that they will successfully transmit their Catholic belief system to at least one (and probably both) of their children. However, if a Catholic and a Buddhist (or Muslim, or Hundu, or agnostic) marry and have 2 kids, there’s a good chance neither child will grow up to claim membership in any major religion in adulthood.

And, as it turns out, this “intermixing” of faiths in marriage has been on the rise ever since WWII.

As America’s technological/scientific sophistication and wealth have increased, increasingly larger amounts of people are leaving home for college, living in a state other than where they were born, travelling more and building ever-more extensive social networks across geographic borders.

All of this activity and movement of people has facilitated demographic inter-mixing in marriage. Racial inter-mixing in marriage is also at its highest rate, as part of the same sociological trend.

So, modernity brings a truly profound intermixing of people, ideas and ways of living.

And this beautiful flowering of human culture is so bright, it blinds us. We are blinded by multi-cultural movies, foods, music, religions, technologies to the point that we don’t even see culture anymore. We all increasingly seem to share in each others’ culture, so as to make the monolithic idea of a single, better culture implausible.

It makes increasingly less sense to ask “Which culture is superior?” in a modern society, and increasingly more sense to ask “Which cultures interest you?”

The transmission of belief systems depend on their perceived (from the believer’s point of view) superiority over other belief systems.

We se this everyday as parents attempt feverishly to transmit belief systems deemed crucial (whatever they may be) to their children. Those belief systems which seem more and more arbitrary, more and more unlikely to be crucial in later life, are not actively disliked, but simply ignored.

A parent in a traditional society (or, in America, one who has low levels of education) asks themselves, “How do I encourage my child to believe what I believe, for their own moral and social health?”.

A parent in a modern society (or, in America, one who has higher leverls of education), by contrast, ponders another question : “How do I encourage my child to actively and successfully pursue their own interests?”

The traditional parent thinks their religion is superior — they will have fewer friends from other faiths, will be less likely to live in a diverse city and less likely to be educated about religion (even, hilariously, oftentimes their own).

The modern parent thinks that all religions are equally valid descriptions of the sacred — they will have more friends from faiths other than their own, will be more likely to live in a diverse city, and more likely to successfully answer survey questions about the religious faiths of others.

The diversity of religious beliefs surrounding the individual ( generated from diverse friends and experiences, as in attending college), makes the idea of one special, superior system of beliefs seem unlikely. Intolerant and ignorant, even.

So, when parents begin to see the faith of their upbringing as just one among infitinely valid expressions of the sacred, they are heartened by the idea of their child’s OWN pursuit of THEIR sacred.

Yet, the consequence of this is that religion as a system of coherent beliefs will dissolve as well. When everyone pursues their OWN truth, there is no longer THE truth.

Thus the transmission of any ONE belief system, from generation to generation, begins to slowly decline, as it has been all across the Western world for about 200 years.

Religion is walking, quietly out the door.

What’s fascinating is that sociology tells us that humanity will simply forget to wave goodbye.

Fear of Death as a Variable

We’ll all die. Some of us are more aware of this than others. Some of us regret the fact more than others.

93% of all the people who have ever lived are now dead. The 7% who haven’t died are the 7% alive right now – us. Those numbers are convincing.

Death is more than an event that marks the conclusion of an organism’s life. Death has also a subjective character. We feel death, we fear death, we contemplate what it would be like to finally fade away.

As creatures with a concern for our own lives, such thoughts frighten us. The thought of non-existence is perhaps the first source of cognitive dissonance. It certainly is the most fundamental.

We must reconcile the fact of death with what we think we know about existence. Death is subjectively un-interpretable, yet we have no choice but to cognize it – we are creatures that survive by interpreting. This painful paradox forever remains the spark of our aspiration for explanations, interpretations and intuitions about death.

But there are tragic consequences for those who fear death.

Those who fear death are at greater risk of believing in wish-fulfillment fantasies. Belief in heaven and hell (whatever the religious tradition) is truly a belief in (1) continuance of the subjective self after brain death and (2) righteous judgment after death that will appropriately punish every possible wrongdoing.

Neither (1) nor (2) is possible in the natural world. All of our demonstrable evidence about reality suggests that we appear to live in a natural – and not a supernatural –  world, therefore (1) and (2) are not possible. Despite being impossible, people still believe them. If the very thought of death invokes immediate and intense cognitive dissonance, than believing in the laugh-out-loud preposterousness of heaven and hell ain’t so bad if it makes you feel a little better.

Related to the wish fulfillment of heaven and hell are the unnecessary fears some people have about ghosts, haunted houses and other ‘spirits’, ‘lost souls’ or whatever. This is all make-believe. For those of you who believe in these magical entities: they result from your brain healthily and naturally extrapolating logically (to other people) what you currently believe about yourself (that your soul continues after death).

Such beliefs in ghosts and hauntings are common and cause a lot of fear in both adults and children. About 50% of the American population believes in or is on the fence about the existence of ghosts and spirits. Consequently, ‘haunted’ houses sell for much less on the market, police departments literally throw money away on ‘psychics’ who claim to ‘speak’ with the dead, and people every day thank ‘guardian angels’ for being saved from a dangerous situation by real, flesh-and-blood caring human beings.

Fear of death also causes some people to be excessively timid and fearful. If we have only one life and all the status, power and prestige I have in this life is all I will ever have, I want to protect it, safeguard it. The best way to do this is to cower and hide through life, saying only what one must in order to improve one’s self image. This is the core of selfishness.

Relatedly, since we only have one life, some people find themselves afraid of disowning and abandoning other people. Ah, what the hell, right? We only live once? Why not be a lover and not a fighter? The fact remains that some people are consistently hurtful, unkind, disagreeable and greedy. They deserve to be abandoned in this life, and in any life. Doing the opposite is cowardice and fear of retaliation and that’s all it is.

Luckily, some unexpectedly good things may come from not fearing death (besides being free of nonsense beliefs about heaven and hell, souls, ghosts and ‘secret’, ancient herbal remedies for liver cancer).

The transcendental temptation won’t go away. The desire, the lust, to belong to something greater than ourselves will probably never go away. In essence, even if we disavow supernatural childishness, we still stand to lose everything upon death unless we attach ourselves to a cause greater than ourselves, more significant than our lives, and deeper than our single existence.

Finding oneself attached to a cause (and this can be anything so long as you are 10 fingers and 10 toes devoted) is subjectively equivalent to living forever and enjoyable in and of itself. Once we’re dead, we won’t care that our individual importance is not very significant – we’ll be dead. While we’re alive, though, we can glance and see our mark on some seemingly eternal human project, and glimpse, for a moment, what eternal life might look like.

Death is also, in some ways, a good thing. Bad ideas often die with bad people. Why would anyone want to imagine a reality where the souls of Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan, and Osama Bin Laden continue on forever? Also, if all of us will be dead in several decades, doesn’t that mean that our relationships are that much more valuable? If existence endured forever, no sense of immediacy, of passion, of urgency would vitalize our dreams and our affections.

Death is also a reminder of the long quiet that is to come. All the more reason to speak up now, while our lungs still have air.

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Rates of belief in nonsense:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/17275/onethird-americans-believe-dearly-may-departed.aspx