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this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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Also, a point I don't see others mentioning, is religious people often tend to have more children, and whilst religion isn't actually hereditary, children often do have more likelihood to follow the same religion as their parents, the population is likely to tend to more extremist religious people, unless the rate of conversion away from those religions drastically increases.
Well, if that were the case wouldn't we expect to see near universal religious belief now?
We can't start the population set now, we should look at when religion started.
I'd posit that as time goes on, the religious beliefs tend to want to spread, but they also round off more difficult to wrangle aspects to maintain appeal to a wider audience. A belief system incompatible with observed reality or unpalatable to potential new believers is going to be less robust than one that fits and is welcoming.
It's why today's extremists are generally more tame than the commonplace believers of the past.
Eventually some people catch a version of the religion so weak that it's only kinda comparable, and you have the Christian who never goes to church or thinks about it really, or the person who's a vague notion of spiritual without much specific behind it beyond a vague notion of purposeful intention to the world.
I'm not talking about converting new believers from outside, I'm talking about children inheriting the religion of their parents. And yes, in the places where religion has spread, only a small percentage of the population wasn't religious, and it's a relatively recent thing that a significant fraction of society isn't religious.
But we still see a trend line of decreasing religiosity and a taming of extreme religious beliefs.
Children are way more likely to take the religion of their parents than otherwise, but they're still new believers that the idea has to be able to take hold in, and if the idea just doesn't fit then you'll see a departure. It's not like their religion is the only one trying to take root.
I just don't think we see the world today that we would if religion spread with the force of population dynamics.
We see majority religions like Christianity decreasing, but minority religions are actually increasing, at least in the US.
Hopefully the inbreeding within those weirdo groups helps fix that.