[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.

[hnaccount_rng]

You started with

> 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.

that basis is what I objected to. I never made a claim to the actual numbers. There I'd tentatively agree with you, in that I'd suspect, that it is less than 10% of the population that goes to church on a weekly basis. But that's a "if you force me to pick" statement not something that I'd put high stakes in. Especially since the link that you reacted to is for data from 2008 to 2017. And... back in 2008 I'd not be surprised _at all_ if >10% would have gone to church weekly.. And yes we can quibble about whether missing church a couple of weeks per year should still allow yourself to count as "goes to church weekly" and whatever. I really don't care about the particular number. I care (or really was triggered momentarily and hit the reply button ;)) about your assertion that the 10% number _must_ be wrong, _because_ you yourself don't know "a single person that _remotely_ qualifies". (which given your place of origin I also doubt, but whatever)

[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.