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Afterlife beliefs are the defining feature of religions (IMHO). So it is no surprise to find that religious people fear death.
Another fact, brought out in some detail in Gananath Obeyesekere's book on rebirth eschatologies "Imagining Karma", is that once we introduce morality into the picture then at a minimum the afterlife bifurcates: good people (however defined) go to a good afterlife; and bad people go to a bad afterlife. We see this in Egyptian religion and in Zoroastrianism and all their successors - including the Abrahamic religions. We see it in Indian religions with rebirth eschatologies as well.
So religious people not only fear death more, but have more reason to fear death. Since none of us is perfectly moral, perfectly good, we have reason to fear that our imperfections will condemn us to an unpleasant afterlife - and judgement in the afterlife tends to be inescapable unlike judgement in this life.
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Muslims seem to be more likely to believe in a vindictive god, and less likely to believe in a forgiving god. The authors put this down to fundamental differences in Islamic and Christian religions.
That's possible, but I'm also inclined to think that Christianity has reinvented itself over the past 100 years. As social structures have evolved, the idea of god as a punisher has fallen out of fashion - indeed, many modern Christians don't have any meaningful belief in Hell at all. -
the observation that the non-religious have a very low fear of death. Other studies have also shown that the non-religious have a higher suicide rate. Could these two observations be linked?
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Abstract
Patients in persistent vegetative state (PVS) may be biologically alive, but these experiments indicate that people see PVS as a state curiously more dead than dead. Experiment 1 found that PVS patients were perceived to have less mental capacity than the dead. Experiment 2 explained this effect as an outgrowth of afterlife beliefs, and the tendency to focus on the bodies of PVS patients at the expense of their minds. Experiment 3 found that PVS is also perceived as “worse” than death: people deem early death better than being in PVS. These studies suggest that people perceive the minds of PVS patients as less valuable than those of the dead – ironically, this effect is especially robust for those high in religiosity.
Highlights
► Vegetative patients are seen to have less mental capacities than the dead. ► People focus on the bodies of PVS patients at the expense of their minds. ► Religious people show this effect most strongly, because of their afterlife beliefs. ► PVS is also seen as a state worse than death. ► These findings reveal an irony behind fights to keep PVS patients alive.
a new analysis by psychologists Gary Lewis, Stuart Ritchie, and Timothy Bates at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has provided some more, rigorous evidence that the link is indeed real. They took data from the large MacArthur Foundation Survey of Midlife Development in the United States and found that high IQ was significantly associated with every one of six different measures of religion.
This effect still held even after adjusting for factors like education, sex, age and even personality. OK, there was no longer a relationship with spirituality, the weakest of all indicators of religion. On the other hand the effect was strongest with fundamentalism
The authors point out that the effect is very small. And what's more, there's still no reason to suppose that atheists are more intelligent because of their intelligence. There might be some other factor that they didn't account for that's related to both.
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in one study they did measure IQ, and IQ was indeed correlated with 'thinking style' test scores. That means that cleverer people were more likely to get the answer right.
However, even after adjusting for their higher IQ, deep-thinkers were still more likely to be atheists, and to have lost their childhood religion.
many wealthy individuals, rather than simply allowing redistribution to be decided through the democratic process as such median-voter models assume, respond to higher levels of inequality by adopting religious beliefs and spreading them among their poorer fellow citizens. Religion then works to discourage interest in mere material well-being in favor of eternal spiritual rewards, preserving the privileges of the rich and allowing unequal conditions to continue.
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Frederick Solt and colleagues from Southern Illinois University wanted to test an alternative theory - that the rich and powerful use religion as a tool for social control to keep the poor in their place. They call this the 'Relative Power' theory. Not a new idea, of course, but they came up with a couple of novel ways to test it.
Firstly they looked at data from the World Values Survey, which allowed them to examine how religiosity varied with wealth in different countries.
What they found (after adjusting for a bunch of other factors) was that, in the most unequal countries, both the rich and the poor were more likely to be religious. In fact, and rather remarkably, inequality seemed to have a bigger effect on the rich than on the poor. -
Then they went on to look at how religion, overall wealth, and inequality have changed in the USA since the mid 1950s. The USA is one of the few countries in the world with enough data to do this, but even so the religion data they had to use were a bit cobbled-together. Still, they used a sophisticated statistical tool called vector autoregression, which allows you to see how the variables seem to influence each other over time without making any underlying assumptions about cause and effect. It can even help uncover whether the relationship is circular.
Now, the USA over the past 50 years has been characterised by increasing wealth, increasing inequality, and decreasing religion. What Solt found was that a rise in inequality one year tended to lead to a increase in religion the next. This was offset by the fact that rising wealth tended to lead to less religion.
However, the opposite did not happen. Changes in religion did not have any effect on later levels of either inequality or wealth.
Solt and colleagues interpret this as more evidence for their 'Relative Power' theory. They point out that high levels of inequality in a democracy are difficult to understand using ideas based on rational self interest (the so-called 'median-voter' models of democracy) and conclude that:
...many wealthy individuals, rather than simply allowing redistribution to be decided through the democratic process as such median-voter models assume, respond to higher levels of inequality by adopting religious beliefs and spreading them among their poorer fellow citizens. Religion then works to discourage interest in mere material well-being in favor of eternal spiritual rewards, preserving the privileges of the rich and allowing unequal conditions to continue.
Among the key formative experiences of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) is that of racial and religious conflict as happened in the 1950s and 1960s. To this day, Singapore’s PAP government remains wary of religion as an organising force for political ends. Yet, their economic policies may have had the effect of promoting religiosity, such that the ground is always fertile for the rise of political religion. The PAP’s governance may be producing the very conditions they fear most.
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It has long been observed that income inequality correlates with religiosity; the greater the inequality, the higher the degree of religiosity. Generally, the hypothesis is that those who are worse off economically seek succour in religion. It comforts them, it gives them hope that perhaps in the next life, things will be better. It gives them a sense of self-worth on the intangible values side to compensate for the humiliations they suffer on the material side (“I may be poorer than you, but I am a better person than you”). The name given to this explanation of the correlation is Deprivation Theory. The more deprived the bulk of the people are, the more unequal the society, the greater interest in religion.
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A variant of the hypothesis incorporates a twist to it, known as Relative Power Theory: Income inequality correlates with religiosity because religion is also useful to the richer classes in maintaining their privileges. Consciously or unconsciously, the better-off classes use and propagate religion to inculcate acceptance among the lower-income of their inferior status. Religion tends to promote a fatalistic view of life, whether cast as “God’s plan” or “You’re not succeeding because you haven’t prayed hard enough”, thereby reducing popular demand for economic redistribution. Additionally, the promotion of religion achieves buy-in by the lower-income classes of the conservative social values that religion often represents, thus channelling their vote-support towards rightwing parties which (surprise, surprise!) tend to champion free-market values — the very values that create and defend income inequality and oppose redistribution. The greater the inequality, the more the richer classes deploy religion to protect their interests.
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Hardliners on opposing sides in the battle over climate change are guilty of a weird "religiosity" which hinders a sensible debate, energy minister Greg Barker has said.
In a Guardian interview, Barker said sceptics were failing to accept the "broad base" of scientific opinion, while climate change campaigners could be guilty of behaving in an arrogant manner.
Amid frustration in Whitehall at the tone of the debate, Barker said: "If you look at the extremes of the climate debate, whether it is the extreme climate sceptics or the extreme climate zealots, there is a slight religiosity there which is weird."
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hardliners on both sides should reflect on the consequences of adopting such strident stances. "I think the broad base of sound scientific opinion, of sensible and respected science, supports urgent climate action," he said to sceptics who question the need for action. "Of course science is constantly evolving. The notion that you need to have 100% certainty on any given issue is unhelpful anyway. Acting now on climate is the prudent sensible thing to do."
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climate change campaigners needed to be careful not to dismiss sceptics such as the former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson of Blaby. "We need to make sure don't behave in an arrogant or offhand way because that really pisses people off," he said.
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