Jazzns writes:
With that I would like to offer my opinion and in it my hope for the basic sense of humanity that I like to believe most people hold. I think that nothing would change.
There's certainly no reason to believe that general standards of behaviour would deteriorate if your country lost its high level (to Western standards) of religiosity. One way to reassure those who worry about this is to take a look at countries which have already gone a lot further down the road to losing their traditional religions. The differences in the statistics in the extract below illustrate how difficult it is to survey religious beliefs due to factors like how questions are phrased and levels of response to questionaires etc., but I think we could safely say that the percentage of non-believers in Sweden is at least four times higher than that of the U.S.
From:
quote:
Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns(1) Phil Zuckerman
Page not found - Academics
quote:
According to Norris and Inglehart (2004), 64% of those in Sweden do not believe in God. According to Bondeson (2003), 74% of Swedes said that they did not believe in “a personal God.” According to Greeley (2003), 46% of Swedes do not believe in God, although only 17% self-identify as “atheist.” According to Froese (2001), 69% of Swedes are either atheist or agnostic. According to Gustafsoon and Pettersson (2000), 82% of Swedes do not believe in a “personal God.” According to Davie (1999), 85% of Swedes do not believe in God.
If Sweden's anything to go by, and an irreligious U.S. ended up like a giant Scandinavian country, you would have to put up with the loss of your ghettos and much of the hard edge of poverty, a considerably lower murder rate and a lower rate of rape and other violent crimes, and, interestingly, a lower abortion rate (in spite of easy availability on demand) and the virtual eradication of one major sexually transmitted disease (these last two at least partly because of pragmatic sex education, something many religious people object to).
So I wouldn't worry too much, Jazzns. The U.S. will certainly not become a living Hell through widespread loss of superstition if the least religious areas of the world are anything to go by!
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