An Extinction I Can Welcome

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Tudamorf
Posts: 369
Joined: Thu Oct 14, 2010 2:45 am
Location: San Francisco

An Extinction I Can Welcome

Post by Tudamorf »

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12811197
Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team's mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

Nonlinear dynamics is invoked to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a number of factors play a part.

One of the team, Daniel Abrams of Northwestern University, put forth a similar model in 2003 to put a numerical basis behind the decline of lesser-spoken world languages.

At its heart is the competition between speakers of different languages, and the "utility" of speaking one instead of another.

"The idea is pretty simple," said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona.

"It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility.

"For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there's some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not."

Dr Wiener continued: "In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%."

The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the "non-religious" category.

They found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them.

And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.
All I can say is: Amen.
Fyyr
Posts: 294
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2010 2:32 am

Re: An Extinction I Can Welcome

Post by Fyyr »

Oh, thank God.

Finally.
AbyssalMage
Posts: 156
Joined: Mon Oct 25, 2010 12:06 am

Re: An Extinction I Can Welcome

Post by AbyssalMage »

I doubt religion will become extinct. Quite the contrary, as they stated in there article about language, we will all have a singular religion. A hybrid of the worlds religions of today would be my guess. I.e. the best of each.
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