Reference Research Paper: The Chronic
Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional
Psychosociological Conditions
The link is above for those interested in reading this in-depth.
But to summarise it:
In recent years, it had been claimed and assumed by multiple
researchers that humans were innately religious, because of the
prevalence in religion in human societies since time immemorial,
and that the rising secularism in human society since the 19th-20th
century is but a recent phenomenon.
On the same tangent, plenty of religious people contend that their
religion, be it Christianity, Islam or Buddhism (but I don't
consider Buddhism a 'religion' per se) provides a strong moral
compass for whichever society it resides in, and is generally
beneficial to society. I disagree with both contentions.
The data gathered in this paper suggest that increased religiosity
in society does not correlate at all with a more stable or
harmonious society in both social and economic factors. The top
five ranked nations, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Norway and Holland are
all noted for their secularism, and strong values in a stable
society indicated by low rates of homicides, suicides,
incarceration (number of people put in jail), STD rates, life
satisfaction index, marriage duration and abortions, and economic
equality.
The United States, on the other hand, has a very strong culture of
publicly declared religiosity (no American politician could hope to
be elected to office unless they were publicly declared Christians,
or were Jews), and has indications of high social and economic
instability at the same time.
My contention out of all this, is that the more evolved humans have
proven themselves to not need God any longer. They have made for
themselves, societies which have benign social and economic
environments that do not create much stress to the point that
people need to turn to the irrational supernatural (religion) for
comfort or solace. It is true that humans have always relied on
religion until very recently, but only because civilization was
still very much in flux until the 21st century in a select few
nations when its inhabitants have decided for themselves that God
was no longer needed.
