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thabet

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  • razib 12:55 pm on June 15, 2008 | #

    1) the least religious nations in the world are in east asia, not the west. even south korea, which sends the second largest number of xtian missionaries after the USA has more atheists proportionately that most western nations. fraser’s argument is not without merit, but doesn’t mention this tidbit because it makes the case for irreligiosity’s identification with the west weaker.

    2) of course religion is conflated with other identities. in the USA the secular liberal contempt for religious conservatives is regularly conflated with prejudice against low class “inbred” whites in general (the fact that black americans are, on average, religious conservatives is not of worth inquiry aside from boundary conditions such as the homophobia within the black community).

    3) the relationship between IQ and atheism holds *within* most societies. south korea might be an exception here, where theists are more likely to be well educated and of upper SES.

  • razib 12:58 pm on June 15, 2008 | #

    p.s. defenders of religious traditionalism (even if mildly) such as philip jenkins noticeably play up the fact these trends are more in evidence in non-white segments of the populace. the aim is pretty clearly to innoculate them from secular liberal critiques of these religions based on their backwardness because secular liberals don’t like to talk at length in public about how backward colored people are anymore (as opposed to lower class whites). so everyone plays this game.

  • aziz 1:25 pm on June 16, 2008 | #

    re: 1), razib - is it meaningful to argue that “least religious” equates to atheists, necessarily? I think that theres some leeway when we are talking about east asian countries, where the overlap between secularist, atheist, and even eastern-religion is finite. Arguably the major eastern religions dont represent the same kind of religion as western ones, and could even be considered “secular” (though not for any lack of spiritual belief).

  • razib 1:34 pm on June 16, 2008 | #

    “is it meaningful to argue that “least religious” equates to atheists, necessarily?”

    well, for south korea i know the frequency of atheists. that’s an easy question to ask and answer, so i was conflating purposely since.

    “Arguably the major eastern religions dont represent the same kind of religion as western ones, and could even be considered “secular” (though not for any lack of spiritual belief).”

    that’s a complicated and real issue. there’s no definitive answer here, but

    1) i would say that the religious studies types who emphasize the non-theistic nature of eastern religions aren’t describing operational reality. IOW, only a small proportion of buddhists are atheists, or would conceive of themselves as such (i know this from ethnographic studies as well as personal communication; many chinese people who i tell that i’m an atheist explain that they’re not atheist, they’re buddhist). only a small proportion of atheists would have a connection to an institutional religion.

    2) there is an orthogonality between superstition, spiritual, institutional religiosity, etc. in short, in east asia institutional religion is really weak. levels of atheism are high on a *relative* world-wide scale, lower than the level of non-attachment to institutional religion. so the subset of people who hold supernatural beliefs but do not affiliate with any one religion is far larger in japan and china than it is in the united states. to some extent though this east asian pattern is emerging in large parts of europe, where institutional religion has declined in penetration, but unaffiliated theism has increased somewhat more than atheism.

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