[jlos]

>> I'd wager more and more of their kids will break away from a religion/belief system that appears increasingly absurd and stifling as the rest of the world moves on.

In the west, increase in secularity has only affected the groups of people who would've been nominally religious (i.e. religious in name only). People who attend religious services on a weekly basis (a much better measure of religiosity) has stayed consistent. This is still a notable shift in religious demographic, just not the kind your portraying.

Further, outside the west, much of the world has kept or has increased their religiosity as they modernized. The belief that modernism produces secularism was abandoned by sociologists of religion some time ago after it was evidentially false (E.g. India is the most religious country in the world and still a modern state).

The fact you can't see value in religious systems adhered to by billions of people over thousands of years speaks less to those systems than your lack of understanding them.

[mlyle]

> In the west, increase in secularity has only affected the groups of people who would've been nominally religious (i.e. religious in name only). People who attend religious services on a weekly basis (a much better measure of religiosity) has stayed consistent.

False: It was 50% in the US 70 years ago. It's about 30% now. This is a decline of 20% in absolute terms, or a 40% decline in relative terms.

Weekly church attendance is under 15% in basically all of Western Europe -- https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/how-religiou... (note that this show US attendance at 36%, but it's also comprised of data 6-15 years old).

It's probably lower than this-- research indicates that people overstate their church attendance in surveys; https://www.religion-online.org/article/did-you-really-go-to...

> The fact you can't see value in religious systems adhered to by billions of people over thousands of years speaks less to those systems than your lack of understanding them.

Plenty of things were done by huge fractions of the world population for thousands of years that deserve questioning. Authoritarianism; oppression of minorities and women; routine warfare with neighboring groups; belief in witch doctors; pooping near water wells, etc. This line of argument isn't a very good one.

[chmod775]

> https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/how-religiou...

10% of Germans claim to go to church every week? I've got friends, relatives, and acquaintances all over the country and of all age groups, and I don't know a single person who would even remotely qualify. That's at least a hundred people. Plugging that into the PMF of the binomial distribution gives me a likelihood so minuscule I should consider buying a lottery ticket. I call bullshit. That research is bunk.

Even the churches themselves claim their weekly attendance is only about 3,300k (catholic church, 2017[1]) + 770k (evangelical churches, 2019[2]) - that doesn't yet mean the same attendees every week.

I still don't trust these numbers, but that's already less than half the above research, making their self-reported attendance numbers essentially worthless.

[1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gottesdienste-laaaangweilig-1... [2] https://www.ekhn.de/aktuell/detailmagazin/news/studie-ueber-...

[hnaccount_rng]

That really says more about your social circle than anything else. Your assumption of statistical representativeness is (quite naturally) completely off. Depending on which part of my social circle one would talk about 10% would have been far too few.. At least a couple of years back. It’s getting better though ;)

[chmod775]

> Depending on which part of my social circle one would talk about 10% would have been far too few.

Depending on which part of the pizza you take, it's not going to have any pepperoni. In other words, if you intentionally take a non-representative sample, unsurprisingly your sample is not going to be representative. I don't really see the point you're trying to make.

10% of Germans cannot be weekly churchgoers when there's at most ~4 million weekly attendees overall. It's obviously impossible. A number lower than 5%, preferably ~1-2%, I can easily square away with that number and my own, not intentionally cherry-picked, sample.

[hnaccount_rng]

If I hadn’t gone to study in a reasonably sized city, my only social circle would have far beyond 10% weekly churchgoers (I’d guess roughly half).

My point is: you seem to have grown up in a very church-removed part of the country (if I had to guess either big city or east Germany). That is where your biased sample comes from. It’s most certainly not representative, and if you claim it to be just because you don’t sub select, then you are at best ignorant and at worst intentionally dishonest ;)

[chmod775]

My family is from a rural area of Hesse (Waldeck-Frankenberg), spread over many small towns and villages. Very down-to-earth folk. Of course they're religious: lots of them go to church, but certainly not anywhere close to weekly. The vast majority will only go on major christian holidays, a smaller number occassionally when they make up their mind on a weekend. I don't doubt that if I asked, my relatives would however know some people who show up every sunday without fail. Same story for others I know in the former west: my Bavarian acquantainces, others in the south. I don't think there's a German state besides Bremen where I don't know someone.

Currently I live in Berlin - I don't think the situation in the northeast needs explaining.

Is your point that I must be wrong and that ~4 million weekly attendees in fact means 10% of Germans do attend church weekly? Cause if that's the kind of mathematics we're doing this conversation is pointless.

[mlyle]

I'm not sure if you're trying to argue with me or enhance my point. If it's the former, note I said: "It's probably lower than this-- research indicates that people overstate their church attendance in surveys" and also pointed out the data is somewhat old.

[chmod775]

> I'm not sure if you're trying to argue with me or enhance my point.

My intent is neither. It's merely tangential.

[skissane]

I think the future of religion in the West – and eventually probably much of the rest of the world as well – is countercultural (ultra-)conservatives such as ultra-Orthodox Jews (Hasidim and Haredim), the Amish, conservative Roman Catholic groups such as traditionalists (SSPX/etc) and Opus Dei, Quiverfull Protestants, Salafist Muslims, etc.

Many of those groups (1) have high birth rates (large families starting at a young age), (2) have high retention rates (>80%, sometimes even >90%) generation after generation. There is no good reason to suppose that (1) or (2) are going to stop any time soon, and even they do for some of them, they are unlikely to do so for all.

I don't think we should expect these groups to follow the same secularising trajectory as mainstream religion. These groups have evolved a cultural immunity to the temptation of defecting to secular modernity which the religious mainstream failed to evolve.

[standardUser]

Give me a break. The trend towards less religiosity in advanced societies is almost as hard and fast a rule as the demographic transition itself. The US has been a laggard, but recent surveys show a very, very fast decline in religious beliefs, profoundly so among the younger generations.

[andsoitis]

India is modern?

France is modern. So is the USA, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Singapore, Canada, and others.

But India?

[primitivesuave]

“Indian exceptionalism” is a prevalent notion among the middle/upper class of India - i.e. the quality of life in India is comparable to other countries. You’ll hear it most from the people who have servants taking care of their household chores (but never the servants themselves). There are also common excuses thrown around like “it has only been 75 years since colonialism” and “the British stole everything”.

I was born in India, grew up in the US, and remember many visits back to the motherland where a relative would extol the virtues of “coming back”. I also remember getting sick all the time, abhorrent public restrooms, sitting in traffic for hours, etc.

Anyone from an actual modern country would agree with you on this, but many Indians living in India would not.

[nwiswell]

It's not hard to understand why repatriation is economically attractive. People who have worked in the West for a decade or two live like kings in India because their accumulated savings goes so far. This huge difference in purchasing power and labor cost is, of course, a characteristic of a developing nation.

The potential problem is: you've spent a big chunk of your adult life living in a developed nation, and despite your massively enhanced purchasing power, you are returning to a developing one, with all the concomitant physical discomforts and social ills.

But social ills are only a problem if you acknowledge them, and physical discomforts are largely solved with a money bubble, so... there we are.

[dotnet00]

I feel like "social ills are only a problem if you acknowledge them", while not wrong, really downplays the differences.

Having spent more time of my life in more developed countries, I find that a lot of little behaviors that are normal back in India really grate on me which aren't as big of a thing in, say, the US.

Basic things like behavior on public transport, over in the US you can generally seem to rely on people standing to the sides of the door in a rough line until people have stepped off, while in India you have to push your way through the crowd trying to push its way in. It's hard to get used to those sorts of things, and many of them aren't meaningfully addressed by simply being wealthy (since similar behaviors carry over to, say, shopping).

Plus, it's even worse for women, who really can't "just" not acknowledge social ills in India as they can have a significant influence on their safety. As a man, I could do essentially whatever I want, party late, wear revealing clothes, get drunk etc. If my sister were to do the same things in India she'd be putting herself at immense risk.

[csomar]

Something doesn’t sit right though, no? You can’t fix horrendous pollution regardless of the amount of money you have and the differential of the modern/developing economies yields. You might have a bigger garden but the city won’t have a biking lane. You might be able to afford private health care but if you rely once on public care (ie: you get into an accident somewhere) then you are screwed.

It’s more expensive to live in a non-developed country than a developed one. Now a close to developed country might be an interesting choice since the prices are still low but the quality is fairly similar.

[csomar]

I had this discussion with several Indians and I don’t get it. It’s not that India is just far from any modern country by any definition, they are also significantly far from developing countries and I’d say they are the worst Hindu/Buddhist country out there. Polluted, Over-crowded, Underfunded infrastructure, Unreliable services, etc.. Many neighboring countries have figured out this stuff even though they still don’t have the job market of modern countries.

They do seem to be improving on the infra. front. But compared to China, they are walking with a turtle’s speed.

[ForHackernews]

> India is the most religious country in the world and still a modern state.

Have you been to India? It's a wonderful, fascinating place but it is emphatically not a modern, developed nation the way France or Japan is.

[gaganyaan]

I would bet a good amount of money that there is a strong correlation between religiosity and lower socioeconomic status within India.

Everybody likes to imagine their woo is special, but it's not. As humanity slowly drags itself out of the nasty, brutish, and short natural way of things, we lose the need for primitive beliefs.

[seanmcdirmid]

Much of the world not including China right? Even if we consider highly religious sub populations (and Uighurs have never been hardcore Muslims even during the Qing dynasty), the entire country is trending toward spiritual but non-religious, just like Japan. Much SEA is similar until maybe Indonesia and the Philippines. Buddhism is setup very much in the form of spiritualism rather than strict religious practice.