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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3141 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 10, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'd point to the wealth of social science evidence showing that religious people are happier, have more friends, give more money to charity, have more trust, have more children and, my personal favourite, have more satisfying sex lives. In our atomised, lonely, anxious, childless and sexless age, all that stuff seems even more important.

Answering why Christianity is a harder question, but I guess I'd point to the alternatives. Only the Abrahamic religions seem to have a strong pronatal effect (Hindus in India have fewer children than Christians and Muslims). Of those, Judaism you really need to marry into and Islam leads to gestures wildly at the Middle East.

I'd point to the wealth of social science evidence showing that religious people are happier, have more friends, give more money to charity, have more trust, have more children and, my personal favourite, have more satisfying sex lives. In our atomised, lonely, anxious, childless and sexless age, all that stuff seems even more important.

How do you know you’re not mistaking correlation for causation, or even getting the causation reversed? Perhaps people who are inclined toward pro-social and conservative temperaments are more likely to express religious belief to pollsters because that’s the social software into which they were raised? Meanwhile the people with the same basic temperament (and same basically successful and pro-social life patterns) who live in Japan — a country where Christianity has had very little impact, and in which most people’s engagement with religious practice is extremely sporadic and surface-level — would either express wishy-washy belief in Buddhism, or honestly report that they are not sincerely religious.

Only the Abrahamic religions seem to have a strong pronatal effect

Why is “having a lot of kids” the most important thing a religion can inspire its adherents to do? African and Haitian Christians routinely have families of 6-7 children, and that certainly hasn’t made their lives or their countries better. I’d much rather those places have smaller families, but for geopolitical reasons and for their own good.

Islam leads to gestures wildly at the Middle East.

Islamic societies were the most advanced in the world for centuries. Look into the Islamic Golden Age. The civilization that built the Alhambra and founded the first universities in the world, institutions which directly inspired the Europeans who founded the oldest centers of higher learning in Europe.

How do you know you’re not mistaking correlation for causation, or even getting the causation reversed?

Studies have looked into that, and there does seem to be a causative effect, even among identical twins raised together. The Japanese are certainly prosocial, but they are also lonely, atomised and have infamously low fertility. Probably if they were as religious as Americans they'd have more friends and more babies.

Why is “having a lot of kids” the most important thing a religion can inspire its adherents to do

The OP was asking why religion is important for a society. Any society with below replacement fertility will eventually be outcompeted by ones with above-replacement fertility. A TFR above 2 the bare minimum for a society to survive, let alone thrive, long term.

Islamic societies were the most advanced in the world for centuries

Were. The Islamic Golden Age was almost a thousand years ago. Now there are five times as many books translated into Modern Greek (13 million speakers) than into Arabic (400 million speakers). We can speculate why the Islamic world declined so precipitously. My theory is that Islam brought with it cousin marriage, which in turn brought clannishness and (relative) mental retardation. But in any case, arguing that society would be better if we all embraced Islam because it would lead to more learning and knowledge seems fanciful.

Early Christian writers talked about treating their women and slaves better than the pagans- and in ancient Rome this was not an all-important value you could expect them to lie about. Anthropologists today note the effects of Christianization in the third world.

Islamic societies were the most advanced in the world for centuries. Look into the Islamic Golden Age. The civilization that built the Alhambra and founded the first universities in the world, institutions which directly inspired the Europeans who founded the oldest centers of higher learning in Europe.

These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic- Islam degrades HBD capital over the long term by encouraging cousin marriage. As a scientific racist I'd expect you to pay attention to that.

These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic- Islam degrades HBD capital over the long term by encouraging cousin marriage. As a scientific racist I'd expect you to pay attention to that.

Doesn't pass the sniff test since the great men of the Islamic golden age were, as far as I know, all Muslims. Any hard evidence for this position?

These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic

This would be highly surprising if true; I’ve seen persuasive evidence that the elites of these societies were not majority Arab, but my understanding is that Islamization was extremely thorough and brutal — hence the flight of the Zoroastrian dissident population all the way to India, where they persist as Parsees to this day.

As for the cousin marriage thing, clearly many forms of Christianity also failed to effectively stamp out the practice (hence the discussion around the so-called Hajnal Line) so this seems far from dispositive regarding the superiority of one over the other.

Islamization was thorough, it probably wasn't quick, the middle east was highly religiously diverse within living memory- preferential immigration policies for middle eastern Christians and different fertility rates are what drove the Christian population from an actual majority in Lebanon, near parity in the rest of the levant, and large minorities in Iraq and Egypt to their current pitiful state. The Ottoman Empire had much larger Christian populations than would be expected based on present day territory.

There is also a vast difference in cousin marriage rates between Christian and Muslim Arabs, to say nothing of non-Hajnal Christian societies like Ireland, Iberia, Slavic lands etc and Islamic societies. The real effect of the Hajnal line was raising the female age at marriage very early.

Why are the current religions the only alternatives? Rome before its days of decadence around the time of the Gracchi thru to Caesar had an extremely pronatal society that was built around civic virtue. Same with Athens during the Persian wars. I'm not familiar with the exact demographics of Confucian China, but I would imagine it's also similar.

Roman pagans were ultimately outcompeted by more fertile Christians. Christianity was so memetically powerful that a middle eastern mystery religion whose founder was executed like a slave went on to become the world's main faith. Islam, arguably a spin-off from Christianity, is the second most popular.

I don't know much about Confucianism or Ancient Greece, but their religious foundations evidently weren't strong enough to last. If you're looking for a religion to hold society together, then it actually needs to survive.

Well Christianity isn't doing too good of a job with survival either right now....

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