Angela
Elite member
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- Ethnic group
- Italian
This might be related to people feeling less family pressure (parents are dead), other words caring less what others think about them. In this case admitting their lack of faith. It also take a big while for religious people to give up faith, switching sides equals "cheating on God" or feeling like sinner.
I think that belief in God probably declines with age among all groups. How much senseless suffering can people watch or endure before they start to doubt the purposes of a so called loving God? The fact that the numbers stay as high as they do suggests to me not only the importance of early training and of cultural norms, but that there is something in people that makes them want to believe, either because they don't want to think that human life is just the result of random chance, or because they want to believe there will someday be some form of justice, and perhaps a reunion with loved ones, and/or they're just hard-wired that way.
There's no getting around the fact that there are advantages to being religious, as numerous studies have shown...religious people are happier, have more stable and fulfilling marriages, they're healthier, they live longer, they have greater mental stability, and on and on. Even the most recognized and successful, by some accounts, addiction treatment program, AA, recommends reliance on a "higher power".
I'd also argue that religion has two components: spirituality and ethics. Most religions address both, but the proportion is sometimes different. In terms of the ethics component, the strength of the ethical proscriptions gains from the "divine" affiliation and the promise of punishment after death in one form or another. I think that some people underestimate the importance of this connection. One well known example is Nazi Germany. That was an atheistic regime which found the religion of Jesus not as good a fit for the culture they hoped to build as some resurrected and reconstructed pseudo-paganism. Not, of course, that atrocities haven't been committed in the name of Christianity...it's just that to do so, you have to fly in the face of a good deal of actual Christian doctrine.
It's my own personal opinion that young people in the post-modern, Judeo-Christian countries, who have more often been raised in non-religious households, and more broadly speaking, non traditional households, are far less ethical in all their relationships, whether it be with a significant other, or friends, or family members, or whether it concerns business or general societal contacts.