Living in a social democracy in a Nordic country (and being a godless treehugging liberal commie queer), I must say I agree. The population here is quite homogenous, and many of us have little practical everyday use for organised religion. That is not to say no people have beliefs of religious dimensions, concepts of an immortal soul, ideas of 'karma', hubris/nemesis and such, though.
We have a Christian Democratic party, which was founded as an anti-abortion party in the 1970's. It didn't get in two elections ago, and has declined to 0,2% of the voters in polls. You almost never hear religious arguments by politicians - I can think of only one who has done so in the past many years, and he's on his way out. The socialists, the social democrats, the social liberals, the fiscally liberal, the libertarians, the conservatives, the nationalists....they refrain from using religious arguments - although some of them express concern about religious extremism, which I think is fair enough.
Around 80% are members of the state-supported Evangelican-Lutheran church, but less than 5% attend church outside events such as funerals or weddings. Some say it's because it doesn't matter if they pay directly to the church for maintaining historical buildings or if it's done through tax, which would be the case if state and church were separated. Note that I definitely hold that we should separate them.
Religion has been confined somewhat into the personal sphere, and bringing up how you met Jesus and he saved your life during a party conversation is regarded as odd. We may have beliefs that are of religious character, but we seldomly bring them up in public. People coil in horror when I tell them of my teaching experiences in a Catholic primary school - a girl asked why I'm shorter than my brother and another answered "It's because God decided so".
Perhaps as humanity advances in technology and communication, we find out that the things old time religion provides are not satisfactory. If we find biotechnological means to halt and even reverse aging (I'm supporting the Methuselah Foundation), then the death-cult views of Abrahamic religion will be surpassed. If we manage to spread language education so that all people speak at least one world language, then we might slowly come to the conclusion that the basis for most old world religions - the distinction between the chosen ones and the others, the heretics, the dhimmi, the gentiles, the shikshas - is moot and destructive. We might find out what Carl Sagan hinted at: "An extraterrestrial visitor examining the differences among human societies would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. We are one species. We are star stuff harvesting star light. Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars."
A local priest said recently, without any notion of sadness or remorse, that the reason why organised religion is slowly declining is that more and more people are perhaps feeling we are in the process of....creating Heaven on Earth.
no subject
Living in a social democracy in a Nordic country (and being a godless treehugging liberal commie queer), I must say I agree.
The population here is quite homogenous, and many of us have little practical everyday use for organised religion. That is not to say no people have beliefs of religious dimensions, concepts of an immortal soul, ideas of 'karma', hubris/nemesis and such, though.
We have a Christian Democratic party, which was founded as an anti-abortion party in the 1970's. It didn't get in two elections ago, and has declined to 0,2% of the voters in polls. You almost never hear religious arguments by politicians - I can think of only one who has done so in the past many years, and he's on his way out.
The socialists, the social democrats, the social liberals, the fiscally liberal, the libertarians, the conservatives, the nationalists....they refrain from using religious arguments - although some of them express concern about religious extremism, which I think is fair enough.
Around 80% are members of the state-supported Evangelican-Lutheran church, but less than 5% attend church outside events such as funerals or weddings. Some say it's because it doesn't matter if they pay directly to the church for maintaining historical buildings or if it's done through tax, which would be the case if state and church were separated. Note that I definitely hold that we should separate them.
Religion has been confined somewhat into the personal sphere, and bringing up how you met Jesus and he saved your life during a party conversation is regarded as odd. We may have beliefs that are of religious character, but we seldomly bring them up in public. People coil in horror when I tell them of my teaching experiences in a Catholic primary school - a girl asked why I'm shorter than my brother and another answered "It's because God decided so".
Perhaps as humanity advances in technology and communication, we find out that the things old time religion provides are not satisfactory. If we find biotechnological means to halt and even reverse aging (I'm supporting the Methuselah Foundation), then the death-cult views of Abrahamic religion will be surpassed. If we manage to spread language education so that all people speak at least one world language, then we might slowly come to the conclusion that the basis for most old world religions - the distinction between the chosen ones and the others, the heretics, the dhimmi, the gentiles, the shikshas - is moot and destructive.
We might find out what Carl Sagan hinted at:
"An extraterrestrial visitor examining the differences among human societies would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. We are one species. We are star stuff harvesting star light. Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars."
A local priest said recently, without any notion of sadness or remorse, that the reason why organised religion is slowly declining is that more and more people are perhaps feeling we are in the process of....creating Heaven on Earth.