Are Canadians More Rational than Americans?
Almost one quarter of Canadians are atheists with that number rising to over one-third for people under twenty-five. At the bottom of this post is the relative ranking for Canada among the top fifty nations. The information was compiled by Adherents.com in 2005. Their figures include agnostics and people who claim not to believe in a deity but do not refer to themselves as atheists. (which should be the definition of an agnostic). I expected the Scandinavian countries to be at the top of the list but look ... even Israel is nearly even with Canada at nineteenth and twentieth place respectively. At the bottom of this post is a short video which summarizes various sources in the United States and Europe on the benefits of reason and such. Notes in hyperlink form are available on the original YouTube site.
From the Canadian Press:
Fewer than three-quarters of Canadians believe in a god, suggests a new Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey.
"Religion in Canada today is not a particularly divisive subject and tolerance levels for different beliefs are high," said Harris-Decima president Bruce Anderson. "This is evident in the fact that one in four people feel comfortable saying they do not believe in a god."The poll found 72 per cent of respondents said they believed in a god, while 23 per cent said they did not believe in any god. Six per cent did not offer an opinion.
Polls have told a different story in the United States.
"Canada's secularism stands in clearer distinction, when compared to the cultural and political influences of religion in the United States," said Anderson. "In one Harris Interactive study in the United States, conducted in 2007, the number who said they were non-believers was only eight per cent."
Keith Howard, a United church minister and executive director of the church's Emerging Spirit program, said the results of the new survey do not represent a dramatic change from previous polls about Canadians' beliefs.
"We are past the time of people trashing God," he said. "They are now trying to find a safe place where they can nurture that spirituality." (sort of a half-way house like unitarians or agnosticism?)
He said a poll done for the church last year indicated Canada is a nation of believers, not belongers.
Howard said his sense is that people who believe in a god increasingly imagine a nebulous but powerful force for good, rather than the traditional concept of a deity.
| Country | Total country population (2004) | % Atheist/ Agnostic/ Nonbeliever in God | Number of Atheists/ Agnostics Nonbelievers in God (minimum - maximum) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sweden | 8,986,000 | 46 - 85% | 4,133,560 - 7,638,100 |
| Vietnam | 82,690,000 | 81% | 66,978,900 |
| Denmark | 5,413,000 | 43 - 80% | 2,327,590 - 4,330,400 |
| Norway | 4,575,000 | 31 - 72% | 1,418,250 - 3,294,000 |
| Japan | 127,333,000 | 64 - 65% | 81,493,120 - 82,766,450 |
| Czech Republic | 10,246,100 | 54 - 61% | 5,328,940 - 6,250,121 |
| Finland | 5,215,000 | 28 - 60% | 1,460,200 - 3,129,000 |
| France | 60,424,000 | 43 - 54% | 25,982,320 - 32,628,960 |
| South Korea | 48,598,000 | 30 - 52% | 14,579,400 - 25,270,960 |
| Estonia | 1,342,000 | 49% | 657,580 |
| Germany | 82,425,000 | 41 - 49% | 33,794,250 - 40,388,250 |
| Russia | 143,782,000 | 24 - 48% | 34,507,680 - 69,015,360 |
| Hungary | 10,032,000 | 32 - 46% | 3,210,240 - 4,614,720 |
| Netherlands | 16,318,000 | 39 - 44% | 6,364,020 - 7,179,920 |
| Britain | 60,271,000 | 31 - 44% | 18,684,010 - 26,519,240 |
| Belgium | 10,348,000 | 42 - 43% | 4,346,160 - 4,449,640 |
| Bulgaria | 7,518,000 | 34 - 40% | 2,556,120 - 3,007,200 |
| Slovenia | 2,011,000 | 35 - 38% | 703,850 - 764,180 |
| Israel | 6,199,000 | 15 - 37% | 929,850 - 2,293,630 |
| Canada | 32,508,000 | 19 - 30% | 6,176,520 - 9,752,400 |
| Latvia | 2,306,000 | 20 - 29% | 461,200 - 668,740 |
| Slovakia | 5,424,000 | 10 - 28% | 542,400 - 1,518,720 |
| Switzerland | 7,451,000 | 17 - 27% | 1,266,670 - 2,011,770 |
| Austria | 8,175,000 | 18 - 26% | 1,471,500 - 2,125,500 |
| Australia | 19,913,000 | 24 - 25% | 4,779,120 - 4,978,250 |
| Taiwan | 22,750,000 | 24% | 5,460,000 |
| Spain | 40,281,000 | 15 - 24% | 6,042,150 - 9,667,440 |
| Iceland | 294,000 | 16 - 23% | 47,040 - 67,620 |
| New Zealand | 3,994,000 | 20 - 22% | 798,800 - 878,680 |
| Ukraine | 47,732,000 | 20% | 9,546,400 |
| Belarus | 10,311,000 | 17% | 1,752,870 |
| Greece | 10,648,000 | 16% | 1,703,680 |
| North Korea | 22,698,000 | 15%* | 3,404,700 |
| Italy | 58,057,000 | 6 - 15% | 3,483,420 - 8,708,550 |
| Armenia | 2,991,000 | 14% | 418,740 |
| China | 1,298,848,000 | 8 - 14%* | 103,907,840 - 181,838,720 |
| Lithuania | 3,608,000 | 13% | 469,040 |
| Singapore | 4,354,000 | 13% | 566,020 |
| Uruguay | 3,399,000 | 12% | 407,880 |
| Kazakhstan | 15,144,000 | 11 - 12% | 1,665,840 - 1,817,280 |
| Mongolia | 2,751,000 | 9% | 247,590 |
| Portugal | 10,524,000 | 4 - 9% | 420,960 - 947,160 |
| USA | 293,028,000 | 3 - 9% | 8,790,840 - 26,822,520 |
| Albania | 3,545,000 | 8% | 283,600 |
| Argentina | 39,145,000 | 4 - 8% | 1,565,800 - 3,131,600 |
| Kyrgyzstan | 5,081,000 | 7% | 355,670 |
| Dominican Republic | 8,834,000 | 7% | 618,380 |
| Cuba | 11,309,000 | 7%* | 791,630 |
| Croatia | 4,497,000 | 7% | 314,790 |
Labels: agnosticism, atheism, libertarian socialism, libertarianism, rationality, reason
posted by Werner @ 6:20 PM
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8 Comments:
Funny comics, and interesting commentary as well. Things are looking better in the United States, fortunately, with the younger generation believing in God less than the older one. Hopefully this is a trend that will continue.
I have though this to be the case for a long time. I remember the poll that showed 40% of Americans thought that the world was less than 10,000 years old and the hassle over evolution there. They really are less rational, which explains a lot of their policies in the world.
Werner,
Well, aside from the implicit and obvious chauvinism and nationalism implicit in your self-identification with a nationally-defined collective (very odd for an anarchist to take pride in his nationality) and your euro-centric identification of "religion" with deity-worhip (a description that excludes many variants of Buddhism and Taoism, partially invalidating your use of these statistics) there are some definitional problems with this information.
For one, the statistic on Japan doesn't reflect the fact that most Japanese still practices from a variety of traditions without identifying with any of them. Shinto and Buddhist (and to an extent, Christian) teachings are deeply entangled in Japanese everyday life, though the Japanese people themselves may not make much of it. Generally speaking, it can be difficult for outsiders to disentangle "real" Japanese religion from everyday superstition and rituals; most Japanese people do not often give the distinction much thought, so it is understandable that they would commonly identify as "non-religious" even while engaging in rituals that they believe to work.
Also high on the list are former or current Communist societies that violently suppressed religious expression in favor of their own hegemonic ideology. Marxist ideology, which still has a sizeable following in this countries (and others, particularly the Scandinavian ones, BTW) bears similar functional features to organized religion in the way it acts on society and on individual adherents. Just consider the parrellels with Christianity: It serves as a source of collective unity and as a legitimizing force for authorities. They assert that obedience to them, along with the supression of self-interest which is viewed to come from false consciousness (Satanic temptation/bourgeois ideology) to attain purity (the socialist New Man) and eventually reach paradise at some unknown future time. All of this is, of course, reinforced by pseudo-scientific justications that shift to accomodate contradictory evidence, and authoritarian forms of social engineering.
Whether or not the statistics take Marxism into account, its structure and social functions were clearly a state religion, for all intents and purposes. If space aliens were watching the Maoists, they'd see very little difference their ideology and Iranian Islamism.
Similarly unacknowledged is North Korean juche, a form of ideological state-worship no less religious in nature than the Shinto-inspired deification of Hirohito.
(Regarding the cartoon. While it's certainly a common, and smug, for atheists to make, the assertion that deities do not exist is, in fact, a belief. It's a affirmative claim, as opposed to the purely passive claim that deities may not exist. Likewise, the claim that the Christian God exists carries with it the implicit claim that the Muslim God does not, and vice versa. The atheist claim carries with it the implicit claim that neither exist.
I'm sure at this point you have some ad hominems cooking about how of course I'd say that, because I'm obviously an ignorant American Fundamentalist. So I'll just claim, for my own insurance, that I'm an atheist who happens to agree with the claim that I recognize as a belief.
Gambone,
Who is this "they" that you speak of and what policies have "they" implemented? You may not realize this, but policies are commonly set by politicians, who only represent a small subset of the population. The average person does not legislate.
To Soviet Onion,
Chauvinism has very little to do with it. There are plenty of things wrong with this country as any anarchist living here will tell you. That doesn't change the fact that religion is not quite the obsession here that it is in the U.S.. In the western part of this country (where I live) things are not as rosy as the figures would indicate but I am talking about averages, obviously. IF you are an atheist then that is to the good. I didn't say that all Americans are fundamentalists but that doesn't change the fact that politicians appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Using the term "rational" was deliberate as a kind of snarky adjective for atheism. You shouldn't take things so personally. I've also changed the title to an interrogative to, I hope, emphasize this fact.
Coincidentally, I read this post right after I read the one on the Aardvarchaeology blog (from February) on U.S. Politics' having no left wing. They seem to resonate with one another. But Sunday's Dallas Morning News also featured an article by Christine Wicker on how evangelicals (and in particular Southern Baptists) are losing ground--so maybe there's hope for rationality south of the border.
SO, "They" refers, of course, to Americans. While few Americans legislate, the existence of a great mass of irrational and often hate-filled individuals creates a mass base for the sort of criminal policies that the US has inflicted upon this world.
As for your conflating Stalinism, Maoism and Buddhism with religion in the sense discussed in Werners posting, you are confusing ideology and philosophy with religion.
I agree that the connections between evangelicals and "other" conservatisms is starting to break down. That might partially explain assholes like Michael Crichton who, is both a neo-con and an atheist. I certainly hope that this translates into a major defeat for the loonies around Bush. Of course the other guys aren't that great either but anything is better than a theocracy. Americans, especially younger ones, who are standing up against religion are to be admired. And for the record this is one leftist who doesn't think all the evils of the world are caused by the US. Certainly many of them though. In a sense the US is becoming an enforcer for some lesser empires like the EU. But it remains to be seen how a renewed populism (as I see it) will push things. I'm really not sure.
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