Post by Séamus on May 16, 2023 23:35:36 GMT
May 8, 2023 19:15:42 GMT Starlight said:
The problem with using birth rates to determine future group size is that the birth rates rarely stay at a high level otherwise you'd be having exponential growth ala grains of rice on a chess board.Spreading religion by producing children is also a very slow way to spread a religious idea. It takes a lot of effort to ensure the religion takes. Typically, more people lose their religion than gain a religion when they become adults. Once people stop believing in the religion they were brought up in they typically don't adopt another. This is a sort of one-way filter. Once the chain of religion being passed from parents to child is broken then typically is broken for good. Of course there are exceptions - but these are the general trends.
I keep an eye on the Irish census results and you can see that through the last few that not only is there a youth bulge of those with no religion working its way along as individuals age, but there is also a universal increase in no religion in every age category i.e. people in their 40s, 50s, 60s are increasingly identifying as non-religious. These people we raised Catholic but a significant amount became non-religious or cultural Catholics.
I would disagree with your point that religion spreading through demographics is slow. A good example is the Amish population.In the USA the Amish population has doubled on average every 19.63 years. In the 1900 there was around 5000 Amish.
“The North American Amish population grew by an estimated 183,565 since 2000, increasing from approximately 177,910 in 2000 to 361,475 in 2021, an increase of 103.2 percent.”
I'd imagine it's a very 'all-in' religion; there would hardly be passive members. I can recall bring told by someone that has studied in an American seminary that their origins can be traced to a former-Catholic ex-religious. Not sure where he is in the history.
An example of how perceptions and predictions can change through the years- when I was about seven or eight I had a book, published by Ladybird and probably bought at Eason at that time,called Disappearing Animals,about creatures that were going extinct. There was a tiger on the cover. A few years ago I saw a book advertised After Humans(or something like that), apparently about our own extinction,with a tiger on the cover. Probably a bit optimistic about the big cats,but considering that world population has no doubt grown since my childhood, quite interesting.