Did Electricity kill Religion?

They say electricity drove away the fairies. Does it kill all belief?

I find it a lot easier to be absolutely terrified when it’s pitch black out. The last time that happened, I was in a national forest in the mountains, trying to find my way back to my car. My imagination, being mine, was convinced that the woods were full of thieves and I was about to be dead.

As a kid, prayer had a wonderfully soothing effect on my fear or the dark, but my devout spirituality cratered mid-highschool.

Every angry, nostalgic nerd claims that things were better back when he was a kid. Original Star Trek was better; the latest movie in an unholy abomination. Han Solo shot first; the new movie is an unholy abomination. The video games were awesomer, the school curriculae were smarter, the Christmas lights were merrier.

Even Santa Claus was way better when I was 5.

Does everything go to shit with time? Or do we just look at the world through different glasses when we’re little kids? Do we just believe more? Are there monsters under the bed, or just in our imaginations?

We adults don’t fear the dark–and why should we? Look at all of our lights. It’s 2 AM, and I can see my hands! I could write this post on notebook paper without even straining my eyes.

But when the electricity is gone and I’m left in the real, true, dark, suddenly the all of the emotions–not just the fear–come back. They’re stronger in the dark. In the childhood of dawn, we still believe there are things that go thump in the night, but in adulthood and the noonday sun, we’re atheists.

What was life like before electricity? When candles were a luxury?

It is pretty easy to massively over-estimate the amount of light people had at night. I see it frequently in fiction–characters easily reading or noticing each other’s expressions by candlelight.

Candles and fires don’t give off all that much light. And they are costly. Nights were dark. And long.

As much as I enjoyed Christmas as a child, I never felt like it had much to do with winter. When I grew up, I moved to a latitude where the winter sun had set by 4 pm, the rivers froze, and I walked home each night through this icy darkness. When the town strung up Christmas lights and handed out hot cocoa, what a welcome relief they were! So that’s why we lit candles in the winter, took comfort in their light.

When I visit my relatives in the country, I am suddenly confronted with the Milky Way; uncountable thousands of stars thrown like jewels into the darkness. Who has not beheld it and felt the majesty and awe of the universe?

When I look at the stars, I feel as if I am about to fall off the Earth and tumble headlong into the universe, the infinite void.

And from this unutterable blackness, this void, this trembling fear at the universe, do we draw our belief all things mystical. Is this where the idea of gods and ghosts and demons came from? (Angels, I suspect, could only have come at dawn.) When you grandmother tells you a ghost story in a pitch-black house while winter rages outside, what choice do you have but to believe her?

But then the lights came on… and belief flickered off.

The Decline of Religion part 4

Upon further reflection, I’ve decided that all of that other stuff (parts 1, 2, and 3) is probably small potatoes and the biggest, most important thing driving the surge in atheism is information technology/mass media bringing people into contact with millions of other people.

Since religious belief is probably driven by some kind of neural feedback loop that basically results in people doing whatever the majority of people around them are doing, if you live in a world where everyone you talk to is Catholic, you’ll probably be Catholic, but if you suddenly switch to a world where you are watching TV and movies and talking to people on FB and Twitter and whatnot and some of them are Catholic and some are Protestant and you can even follow the Dalai Lama’s FB feed, suddenly you aren’t surrounded by Catholics anymore. Now your feedback loops cannot pick out any dominant religion for you to follow, and without the belief-experience feedback loops going on, you start to feel nothing at all.

In other words, all of those crazy Christians who homeschool their kids and refuse to let them watch TV because they don’t want them exposed to the sinful, fallen world are actually correct. Being around godless atheists all day will turn their kids into godless atheists. Except their kids grow up and join the world anyway, so it’s not really a great strategy.

Anyway, back on track: Once upon a time (about 70 years ago,) most people (at home and abroad!) got the vast majority of their functional information about the world from their parents and other members of their immediate community. We call this vertical transmission. With most of the people in a community adhering to a single religion, people were religious.

Since then, the rise of mass media communication has massively increased the amount of information people get horizontally (or laterally.) This brings people into massive numbers of people not from their own communities–thus all meme-plexes that were passed vertically through communities are under intense, novel competition from horizontally passed meme-plexes.

So Ireland, once an overwhelmingly Catholic country that rejected divorce back in 1987, just legalized gay marriage. Why? Because atheism has suddenly completely triumphed in the past 30 years–probably because the Irish started interacting with a bunch of people who weren’t Catholic via the internet.

(Hilariously, though, “Closer to Dublin, British-ruled Northern Ireland has refused to join the rest of the United Kingdom in recognizing same-sex marriage. …the majority right-wing Protestant Democratic Unionist Party, to which he still belongs, voted down same-sex marriage in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the fourth time in three years.

Much of the opposition there is rooted in religious convictions, based in evangelical Protestantism. The Catholic nationalist Sinn Fein party supports gay marriage in Northern Ireland, but has not been able to overcome the opposition.”–from the NY Times.)

Note that this does not mean that the modern meme-plexes (ie, Progressivism,) that are succeeding at horizontal transmission are “better”, more moral, or in humanity’s or your personal self-interest. It means that this particular environment (mass media/information) favors meme-plexes that are optimized for horizontal transmission over meme-plexes that are optimized for vertical transmission, and religion happens to be (in most cases) optimized for vertical transmission.

Without ethnicity, religious identity disappears. (part 3)

Without ceremony, religion is empty.

Without children, it’s pointless.

Without a strong sense of ethnicity, religious identity disappears.

This is part 3 of a series on the Rise of Atheism. Parts 1 and 2 are here.

 

Different religions exist because different cultures exist. (Culture, of course, is just another word for ethnicity.)

There’s not a whole lot of difference between what Jews, Christians, and Muslims officially believe–we’re talking about a couple of prophets and whether or not one guy is the Messiah. Heck, some Jews think/thought Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson was the Messiah, but no one considers these folks not Jewish. Mormons are polytheistic, but they still consider themselves Christian.

There’s no particular reason–theologically speaking–to consider the three separate religions at all. We only do so because the adherents of these religions insist on it. In fact, just try suggesting to a Jew or Muslim that their religion is practically indistinguishable from the other’s and see how they react. While you are at it, try suggesting to a Pakistani that Urdu is actually just a dialect of Hindi.

The big difference between Muslims, Jews, and Christians is that they are different ethnic groups–Muslims marry Muslims, Christians marry Christians, and Jews–actually, Jews are marrying non-Jews at a tremendous rate, but I bet that’s mostly atheist Jews. Religious Jews still favor other Jews.

In short, religion is ethnicity.

This works as long as you believe your own culture/ethnicity actually exists. If you stop believing that your culture exists, well, you stop believing in the individual bits of it, too. Note that you can have a culture without being particularly aware of it–different American groups definitely have distinct cultures, but aren’t particularly aware of it.

Catholics marry other Catholics and Lutherans marry other Lutherans under the assumption that there is something that it means to be a Catholic instead of a Lutheran. If you regard Catholics and Lutherans as basically identical, then you have no particular reason to marry one or another or even identify as one or another. You just become a generalized “Christian.” And if you stop seeing much difference between Christians and other god-believing folks, then why bother with that distinction? Aren’t you all just theists?

Next thing you know, you’re attending the Unitarian Universalist church, being preached to by an explicitly atheist minister about the wonders of global harmony. Which is fine if you like that sort of thing.

Note that in the graph a posted a few weeks ago:

 

Millennials increasingly are driving growth of ‘nones’

Protestants, Evangelicals, and Catholics have all lost a third to half their members over the generations, but Historically Black Churches have not. Blacks still see themselves as a coherent ethnic group, with strong church affiliation. Whites with some form of ethnic identity also still tend to attend church (or synagogue.) But whites who have effectively lost their ethnic identity do not.

White Americans have generally lost much of their ethnic identity because “white” is not an identity whites like to promote (“white pride” is generally regarded as offensive,) and few of them have much in the way of memories of their grandparents or great-grandparents who might have immigrated from some other country.

I myself am descended from 12 or 13 different ethnic groups, and have to go back to the early 1700s before I find an immigrant in my family tree. (And since some of my ancestors were Indians, I can take the “American” line back as far as science will let me.) Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised to find some other immigrants in the 1800s, but I haven’t yet–despite a fair amount of research, reading family histories compiled by my grandparents, etc. At this point, the most accurate thing I can say is that my ancestors came from the American South.

Without any strong ethnic identity, people stop identifying with any particular church. And the endpoint of that is atheism.

Without Children, Religion is Pointless… (Part 2)

Without ceremony, religion is empty.

Without children, it’s pointless.

Without a strong sense of ethnicity, religious identity disappears.

This is Part Two of a series on the decline of religion. Part One is here.

 

People go to church because they have kids. It happens almost mechanistically. People go to church when they are little kids, because their parents force them to. Then they move out of the house and stop attending–even the devout ones. A decade later or so, they have kids of their own and start feeling the yearn for some sort of religion in their childrens’ lives–something to teach their kids the ethical norms, values, and traditions of their culture–and so they head back to the church of their childhood.

Remember, religion isn’t just a bunch of factual statements about god. If it were that, there wouldn’t be a lot to say. It’s not something people logically believe, because if they did, the children of Muslims in Pakistan would be just as likely to turn out Christian as Muslim. Religion is about culture/ethnicity–it’s a specific subset of culture/ethnicity that happens to sometimes involve a deity. That is, Pakistanis like Allah just like Finns like Deathmetal.

People want to teach their kids to be good people, to be good members of their communities and follow the values of their ancestors, and this is where religion comes in. People go to church specifically for the purpose of getting someone else to spend half an hour trying to cram civilization into their kids teach their children morality, culture, etc. Heck, we even invent extra deities (Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny,) to reward and punish children, just to get them to behave.

 

The fewer children people have, the less need they feel for church. People who have no children have little need for it at all–after their period of non-church attendance as young adults, they will most likely continue not attending church for the rest of their lives. People with one kid feel some slight need for church, but can survive without it. People with multiple children are eager to send them off to Sunday school for a half hour while they go enjoy the relative peace and quiet of a nice little worship service.

But with birthrates dwindling, smaller households become increasingly atheistic over the generations.

 

Of course, you may object that there is an obvious causality in the other direction–some religions are explicitly natalist. Mormons, Hasidic Jews, Quiverfull Christians, and Muslims come immediately to mind. However, these groups are a minority among Americans; they can’t explain the overall tendency of religious Americans to have more children. Thus, it seems more likely to me that either the kinds of people who want lots of children also happen to be the kind of people who want to go to church, or that having lots of children actually drives people to go to church.

 

Stay tuned for Part 3, Religious Identity is Ethnic Identity.

Without Ceremony, Religion is Meaningless… (part 1)

Without ceremony, religion is empty.

Without children, it’s pointless.

Without a strong sense of ethnicity, religious identity disappears.

 

Part 1:

So continuing my reflections on why religious belief has decreased so much in the past few decades:

I theorize–this was originally someone else’s theory, so I can’t take credit for inventing it–that the feeling of the divine presence that people feel at worship or festivals is due to the feedback effects of watching everyone around you experience this at the same time–those “mirror neurons” at work, making you experience inside your head the emotions you’re reading on other people’s faces.

This is the power of crowds–the same power that makes grown men willing to pay actual money to sit in a big stadium and watch other grown ups play a children’s game of keep-away, and feel absolutely exhilarated by the experience instead of mortified. The power that makes peaceful people in big groups suddenly torch cars, or feel suddenly patriotic after singing the Star Spangled Banner together.

Once, totally randomly, I happened to park in the middle of an anti-Fred Phelps rally and had to walk along with it to get wherever I was going. (Probably dinner.)

The rally was fun. There was this great sense of togetherness, this electric excitement running through the crowd. A sense of being united in a common cause, something bigger than oneself.

“This must be why people liked the Nuremberg Rallies so much,” I thought. Only those involved half a million people instead of a few hundred. (As fun as they are, I think I will continue to generally avoid political rallies, because I’m not so keen on thinking other people’s thoughts.)

I have also experienced charismatic religious events, back in the days when I was a religious kid. That was an interesting Episcopal church, I gotta say. Anyway, so you know that thing you do with the laying on of hands and praying for the person in the middle of the hands and then you all feel the Power of God and the person in the middle faints (and maybe is healed or whatever)? Yeah, that is pretty fun, too. I mean, I don’t think it works if you don’t believe it–if you don’t believe in god, you’d probably just stand there feeling very uncomfortable while everyone else around you is falling over or making weird noises. But if you do believe, then you get to partake in the experience with everyone else.

And this is where ritual and ceremony come in. It probably doesn’t particularly matter what kind of ritual you have–you can wave around lulavs and etrogs or dance around the May pole or sing hosannas together–the important thing is that the ritual be meaningful to you and involve other people who also find it meaningful. Then every time you do it, you can access both your previous mental states from the past times you did it, and also the mental states of all the people around you, creating the collective experience of deep religious feeling.

It is no accident that many religions encourage their members to worship and study together, rather than apart. For example, Judaism requires a minyan–a group of ten people–for prayer, worship, reading the Torah, etc. It’s not wrong to do these things alone, it’s just seen as superior to do them together. “It was the firm belief of the sages that wherever ten Israelites are assembled, either for worship or for the study of the Law, the Divine Presence dwells among them.” (From the Wikipedia page.)

From Christianity: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Matthew 18:20

I bet other religions have similar calls to group worship, since group worship is a pretty common occurrence. Individuals of great genuine religiosity may be able to function this way, especially if they spend much of their time reading religious literature and praying and the like, but for the average person who isn’t inclined toward reading, this is probably the fast road to atheism. Luckily for Protestantism, the denominations quickly figured out how to have group religious experiences that rival or exceed Catholicism’s in effectiveness.

These days, however, the same intellectual impulse of, “Why do I have to be around other people to be religious? I can be just as religious at home as at church!” is probably leading a great many people to drift away from religion, leading inevitably to non-belief, since the emotions of others were a critical component of faith all along.

(What’s that, you thought you knew more about how religion works than thousands of years of religious tradition? You thought you could defy Gnon with your “logic” and “reason”? Gnon does not care about logic. Defy, and you will be annihilated, whether you like it or not.)

And as the number of atheists grows, even religious people are increasingly surrounded by people who do not believe, and the amount of belief they can access is thus decreasing. We’ve gone from a society where virtually everyone was Christian and religious expression was seen as a totally normal and welcome part of everyday life, to a society where close to half of young people (the people I typically am around,) are openly non-religious and want nothing to do with that (and even many of the people who claim to be religious make no regular signs of it.) This makes it hard to take religious belief seriously, as people increasingly associate genuine belief with low-class out-groups they don’t want to be part of. (Unless you are part of a prole out-group, in which case you’re probably proud of your religion.)

 

(This might make aspie people particularly bad at religion, because they are [speculatively] less capable of using these feedback structures to internally experiencing other people’s emotions.)

Stay tuned for Part 2: Without Children, Religion is Pointless.

Has Christianity Selected for an Atheistic Upper Class?

I’ve been trying for a while to figure out when atheism became mainstream in the West. Sometimes I answer, “Around the end of the English Civil War,” (1650) and sometimes I answer, “Late 1980s/early 1990s.”

Medieval Europeans seem to have been pretty solidly Christian–probably about as Christian as modern Muslims are Muslim.

Modern Westerners are highly atheistic–even many of the “Christians”. So what happened?

I speculate that the upper classes in France, Britain, and the Colonies (and probably that-which-would-become-Germany and a few other places I’m less familiar with, like the Netherlands,) were largely atheistic by the 1700s. Look at the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers, the behavior of the French nobility, the English distrust of any kind of religious “enthusiasm,” German bishops actively encouraging Jewish settlement in their cities and attempting to protect the Jews from angry peasant mobs, various laws outlawing or greatly limiting religious power passed during the French Revolution, the deism of the Founding Fathers, etc.

By contrast, the lower classes in NW Europe and especially America retained their belief for far longer–a few isolated pockets of belief surviving even into the present. For example, see the Pilgrims, the Counter-Revolution in the Vendee, maybe German peasants, televangelists in the 80s, blue laws, and Appalachian snake handlers in the ’50s, etc.

So how did that happen? I propose that the upper class and lower class followed different evolutionary trajectories (due to different conditions), with strong religiosity basically already selected out by the 1700s, meaning the relevant selection period is roughly 500-1700, not post-1700s.

During this time, the dominant religion was Catholicism, and Catholicism has generally forbade its priests, monks, nuns, etc., from getting married and having children since somewhere abouts the 300s or 400s. (With varying levels of success.)

Who got to be an official member of the Church hierarchy? Members of the upper class. Peasants couldn’t afford to do jobs that didn’t involve growing food, and upper class people weren’t going to accept peasants as religious authorities with power over their eternal souls, anyway. Many (perhaps most) of the people who joined the church were compelled at least in part by economic necessity–lack of arable land and strict inheritance laws meant that a family’s younger sons and daughters would not have the resources for marriage and family formation, anyway, and so these excess children were shunted off to monasteries.

There was another option for younger sons: the army. (Not such a good option for younger daughters.) Folks in the army probably did have children; you can imagine the details.

So we can imagine that, given the option between the army and the Church, those among the upper class with more devote inclinations probably chose the Church. And given a few hundred years of your most devote people leaving no children (and little genetic inflow from the lower classes,) the net result would be a general decrease in the % of genes in your population that contribute to a highly religious outlook.

(This assumes, of course, that religiosity can be selected for. I assume it can.)

Since the lower classes cannot join the Church, we should see much more religiosity among them. (Other factors affected the lower classes, just not this one.) If anything, one might speculate that religiosity may have increased reproductive success for the lower classes, where it could have inspired family-friendly values like honesty, hard work, fidelity, not being a drunkard, etc. A hard-working, moderately devout young man or woman may have been seen as a better potential spouse by the folks arranging marriages than a non-devout person.

Religiosity probably persisted in the US for longer than in Europe because:
1. More religious people tended to move from Europe to America, leaving Europe less religious and America more;

2. The beneficial effects of being a devout person who could raise lots of children were enhanced by the availability of abundant natural resources, allowing these people to raise even more children. NW Europe has had very little new land opened up in the past thousand years, limiting everybody’s expansion. The European lower classes historically did not reproduce themselves (horrific levels of disease and malnutrition will do that to you), being gradually replaced by downwardly-mobile upper classes. (There are probably regions in which the lower classes did survive, of course;)

3. By the time we’re talking about America, we’re talking about Protestant denominations rather than Catholicism, and Protestants generally allow their clergy to marry.

The Rise of Atheism

“Millennials increasingly are driving growth of ‘nones’”

 

While I question the data on Catholics, the overall numbers look accurate. This is not surprising–frankly, anyone who is surprised has been living under a rock–though I do have to constantly remind myself that even in my generational cohort, over 50% of people claim to be religious, because I find the notion vaguely unbelievable. (Even when I was a kid attending church, I noticed that my fellow “religious” kids didn’t act like they really believed in all of this god stuff, so how religious can all of those people really be?)

The interesting part is simply the phenomenon: society is becoming drastically less religious (even members of the older cohorts are becoming less religious over time.) (I suppose the other interesting part is the insulting hostility of the comments on the piece toward religion/religious people. Is it really necessary to constantly insult the majority of people in the country?)

The big question: WHY?

(I have my own theories, but I’d love to hear yours.)