Religion: Losing the Flock

A new WIN-Gallup poll, entitled the Global Index of Religion and Atheism 2012, has been released.  Depending upon one's view of religion - especially fundamentalist forms of religion - the results are either good news or bad news.  For those who see religion as an all too often malignant force that supports bigotry, oppression and ignorance as I do, the new poll results are good news: the number of individuals describing themselves as "religious" is down 9% from 2005.   And several other things are striking in the findings.  The first is the veritable free fall of religion. The second is that the poorer one is, the more religious one is likely to be, underscoring the allegation that religion is the opiate of the people.  One commentator had this to say about the results in Ireland:

The highlight of the survey was Ireland. One of the questions was, "Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person or a convinced atheist?" And according to the survey, this one-time Catholic stronghold has undergone a dramatic shift. In 2005, when this poll was last conducted, 69% of Irish defined themselves as religious, 25% as non-religious, and 3% as convinced atheists. In 2011, those same numbers stood at just 47% religious, 44% non-religious and 10% atheist. In other words, in just six years, one in every five Irish people has given up religion, which is enough to vault Ireland into the top 10 nations worldwide with the most atheists. This is less a demographic tide than a demographic earthquake.

And it's easy to guess why. In per-capita terms, Ireland suffered more from the Catholic child-rape scandal than any other nation in the world, and the Vatican's response has consistently been one of denial, arrogance and condescension. There's been such fury at the church in the last few years, some pundits wondered if Ireland was "divorcing" from Catholicism, and it appears that this is exactly what's happening. The church authorities have acted as if they were immune from the law and even from public opinion, and that all they had to do was hunker down and wait for everything to blow over. They seem to have forgotten that simply leaving the church is a choice that fed-up people can make. But the Irish people clearly haven't forgotten, and they're voting with their feet in a way that could well set the church on an irreversible slide into demographic irrelevance.

In the USA, the poll results showed:

In the U.S. people who say they are "religious" dropped from 73 percent to 60 percent and the number of Americans who say they are atheists rose, from 1 percent to 5 percent.

As for religion serving as an opiate of the downtrodden, the poll found this:

RELIGIOSITY IS HIGHER AMONG THE POOR: People in bottom income groups are 17% more religious than those in top income groups.  It is interesting that Religiosity declines as worldly prosperity of individuals rises. While the results for nations as a whole are mixed, individual respondents within a country show a revealing pattern.  If citizens of each of the 57 countries are grouped into five groups, from the relatively poor to relatively rich in their own countries, the richer you get, the less religious you define yourself.

For centuries, religious authorities have conspired with rulers to keep the down trodden" in their place."   We are see this even today in Russia where the Russian Orthodox Church appears to be in bed with the Putin regime.