Post: #26

(02-15-2015 07:45 PM)Sonsowey Wrote:  Regardless of the high rate of birth defects the Amish still have massive population growth. A tradeoff that overall makes evolutionary sense.

Yes, you're right. And from what I know we couldn't ask for more peaceful nicer people to reproduce.

There were people at the college I went to in Upstate New York that were culturally similar to the Amish, and the girls from the sect in their plain dresses were hot Nordic blondes. Beautiful clear skin, no ironic smirk on their faces--
I actually thought of trying to join up as getting the hottest chick possible is a high priority in my life-- however reading an account of one Amish guy, he said although they were open to new people joining, most
people raised with electricity find it really hard to live without it.

Although I can't believe in religion myself, a lot of the nicest people are religious. The nutjobs are a small minority.

For me, it's just s strange, medieval idea-- like someone saying the sky is really red, I just don't see the truth.

It just seems so obvious, the dense, paragraph after paragraph of weasel words defenders of religion generate just seem to obscure things an 8 year old can understand.

If evil exists and god is all-powerful, then God is evil.
If evil exists and god is not all-powerful. then God is not God.

Post: #27

I should mention, groups like the Amish and Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews aren't susceptible to secularization like regular religious people are. Shutting themselves off completely from the world outside their particular sect and having 10 kids means that they're able to keep growing exponentially. The Old Order Amish were only a small minority of Amish immigrants from Germany and Switzerland, but the "normal" Amish assimilated into the wider community while the Old Order Amish stayed completely separate and had kids like no tomorrow, so today Amish is basically synonymous with Old Order Amish. The same thing is currently going on with the Jews. After WW2 the Haredi were just a small group of Holocaust survivors from Hungary who were barely on anyone's radar, now it seems inevitable they will become a majority of the world's Jews.

While I disagree with it's overall conclusions about Western countries except for Israel (it predicts they will all turn back to religion by the end of the century due to religious fertility), Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century is worth a read on this subject.

Post: #28

Deluge, it is strange that in the 20th and 21st century you have the dual trends of increasing secularization AND huge population growth among heavily religious sects of people.

Mormons as well, who do not isolate themselves from society like Haredi and Amish people do, also have seen huge population growth.

Seeing that secular people have very low fertility rates, but that the number of secular people seems to continue growing, I have to suppose we are just seeing large societies fragment and many religious sects dying.

I am an atheist and even though most of ny friends believe in God nominally, none of them really go to church or temple, none of them avoid sin, none of them are involved in their religious community or follow its rules at all. So even though they believe in God they do not act appreciably different from Atheists. The point of organized religion, as Atran lays out, is the perpetuation of cultural order and norms, and really a modern "Chrisitian" who does not keep alive the cultural traditions can be said to not really be part of that community. So those Christian faiths that can not hold on to their followers and foster a real community with real practices that are replicated throughout the generations will keep losing people to secularism, atheism, unorganized spirituality, or different religions. On the other hand, religions like Mormonism prosper and their followers take up spiritual space left open by less succesful faiths.

Since the whole purpose of religion is to assuage existential fears that have no rational answer, ie. fear of death, the purpose of life, a sense of belonging and community, religions that lose people into the secular millieu are just failures. Some people will certainly convert to truly engrossing religions that offer community and spiritual fulfillment. Some will drift as secular or nominally religious without making up part of a real religious community. And those who vecome secular have lower fertility andthus, those people die out quicker.

So while a number of faiths are losing followers I would expect to continue to see a certain number of highly succesful religions growing rapidly while the currently largest ones lose adherents to secularism in the West.

Post: #29

I think what we're going to see in coming decades is the continued decline of most religious communities, but also continued rapid growth of the most conservative and fundamentalist groups, especially those which reject modernity, i.e Islamists and endogamous growth sects like the Amish and Haredi Jews. Even groups like the Mormons aren't traditional enough to withstand secularism. For the most part it's only Mormons who live in Utah (~25% of American Mormons) who have relatively high rates of fertility and staying in the church, probably because they're able to maintain their own Mormon culture there, but even that may be threatened as Mormons become a minority in Utah in the next few years. The main source of Mormon growth is proselytizing in Third World countries.

Basically the religious extreme will thrive while the rest dies off. The thing is, growth at the extreme will only have a major impact if they have substantial base to grow off, like Haredi Jews have in Israel. Also, even among endogamous growth sects their high growth rates are slowly declining over time. The Amish are growing half as quickly today as they were for most of the 20th century. Even if these sects grow to the point where they became massive in number, it's not like this hasn't happened before. 20,000 Puritans emigrated to New England during the Great Migration and today they would account for up ~1/5* of white America which is almost 40 million people, but how many of those are still fundamentalist Calvinists? In the long-term I don't think these groups will be able to sustain themselves.

*Immigration to New England dried up after the Great Migration. 1/3 of whites lived in New England after the Revolutionary War (plus all the Yankees in NY/NJ), and ~60% of white America is of colonial stock.

Post: #30

It seems that the secularization ties back with a lot of manosphere themes, the breakdown of the family, immigration fragmenting formerly tight-knit countries and communities, capitalism demanding the labor of everyone including women, women being more "married" to their jobs than their husbands, increasing social isolation leading to promiscuous behavior and lack of pair bonding.

I wonder if among the loser men of the world who are left out of the sexual marketplace altogether, there would be a drive towards religion to fill the emptiness in their lives.

One thing Atran hasn't discussed yet in the book is that religious orders did and do a lot to ensure marriage of one man to one woman, and that everyone essentially gets their own.

Houllebecq and Heartiste I think talked about this, that back in the day everyone would get married now people are so atomized and the sexual marketplace is such a free market that tons of people, mostly men, are basically left out because they can't compete.

So perhaps sexless betas won't turn to religion if it can't offer them the earthly promise of a wife, as it once likely could.

This could be the draw of Mormonism, a religion full of pretty girls looking to marry.

I knew a guy in college who was mormon, got married right after college to this really pretty Mormon girl, in his mid twenties already has a baby with her, she's still cute. He's not even that good looking, not bad looking either, but he's batting out of his league. If Mormonism can promise the average joe a relatively cute girl if only you follow our traditions, they could grow like bonkers.

Post: #31

Hilarious, but I still doubt many people will get behind a religion younger than Islam and almost as kooky as Scientology. That did make me think about faking Mormonism to get a cute wife that stays thin and stable, but I'm still mostly catholic at heart and somewhat nomadic ally secularized from disenchantment myself. I don't want to go to different beliefs because they provide a better atmosphere, I want my religious structure to get their act together.

I'm sure the conversation can be expanded topically on the subjects you've conjectured about so far once you finish the book. It seems more accurate to design comprehensive views out of that data.

Post: #32

(02-16-2015 09:13 PM)TonySandos Wrote:  Hilarious, but I still doubt many people will get behind a religion younger than Islam and almost as kooky as Scientology.

It's funny the Mormons I've known haven't seemed kooky at all. Maybe a bit square (well, not all of them), but not kooky. They seem like good honest traditional people. Whatever their holy book says (you know the bible is crazy too) the people speak for it more than the book, in my opinion.

Post: #33

Having grown up without religion and in a secular environment, believing in a god has always been a completely alien concept. That also made religion, so ubiquitous in the world, a very interesting phenomenon to me.

A few thoughts:

Religiosity is evolutionarily adaptive.

While religious belief indeed builds on mental faculties that evolved for other reasons, e.g. pattern recognition and theory of mind, it has become so widespread because it does increase reproductive fitness. And this must be true, since religious practices are very costly through behavioral and material practices, like those before-mentioned sacrifices and eating restrictions.

The biggest indication of religion being an evolutionary strategy is its obsession with sex. Many of the regulations in successful faiths target sexual behavior. Men should have vaginal intercourse with women. You should not masturbate. You should not practice homosexuality. You should not use birth-control methods. And which relationship forms are acceptable? Exclusive monogamy is. One man should be with one woman, and cheating is forbidden.

Religious sexual mores thus increase fertility and social stability.

Such religions will thus grow in numbers. It will yield relatively stable societies where women bear numerous children and men are invested to work hard and protect their community. Sex is the most powerful motivator, and masturbation, homosexuality and birth-control relieve this urge without reproductive value. If this is not constrained, the birth rate will plummet significantly and this is exactly what we see happening in the Western world.

If there was an powerful, universe-creating god, do you really think he would concern 'himself' with human things like jacking off? But the idea of people believing in a personal god does make sense when you realize that groups of people that acquired these believes started breeding like rabbits. There's a reason that the gods of Christianity and Islam will punish people for transgressions in an afterlife, and also require punishment in this world. This protects the community from free-riders.

Religion is why monogamy is both unnatural and common.

Men often cheat, mostly for variety and siring more offspring. Women often cheat, mostly for obtaining better genes. Monogamy is not common in the natural world and it isn't easy for humans. The reason why most people live in monogamous cultures, is that the groups that enforced it (via religion) grew the biggest.

No monogamy means conflict between males. Competition for females quickly turns violent and is very costly, wasting resources that are better spent on other endeavors. In places where parental investment is less important because of resource abundance, the lack of monogamy results in a lack of fathers working hard towards progress. In other words, monogamy results in many babies and men that work hard.

Even though I am not religious, I have to admit that the technological superiority of the West stems from sexually-restrained, monogamous, religious communities. Why this happened in Europe and not in the Middle East is the topic for another time.

Modernity destroys religion, except when religions are protected by modernity.

Population growth is important and increased by religion. However, scientific progress of a populations confers power relative to primitive populations. Small groups with technology, e.g. weapons and medicine, can easily dominate more numerous competitors. That's what we've seen in the past. And the same scientific insights in the way the world works that are necessary for advanced weapon systems, also erode religious beliefs. Hurricanes and thunder storms aren't angry deities and the world isn't created by divine intervention. These insights contradict religious texts and either result in secularization or mental gymnastics about how it was meant as a metaphor. Or young earth delusions.

So while religion first increased reproductive success, a strict adherence will be a negative against societies that welcome science and technology. Your exponential growth potential means nothing when enslaved or exterminated by enemy populations. But this is not what we see happening.

A group like the Amish can stay fundamentalist and prosper, because they are protected by a host country that bears the evolutionary cost of secularization and technological advance.

In the same way, radical Islam remains competitive because they can use the benefits of modern society (e.g. automatic weapons, missiles and propaganda Youtube productions) without restricting their religious social and sexual paradigm. Without access to our inventions there would be no threat.

Similarly, they can exploit our liberal institutions to expand and dominate. Using our pathologically altruistic laws and policies, they can invade and colonize our territories and breed children on our reserves. The only reason we have all these resources and institutions is because everyone was restricted for the good of the whole. They can extract all the juice while giving nothing back.

Closed systems prevent this exploitation.

If our societies weren't so suicidal and exploitable this wouldn't be possible. Closed borders means separate systems, and then a system would either also have to progress and develop means to gain knowledge (i.e. science) or become absolutely powerless to defend themselves.