{"id":2054,"date":"2011-03-22T17:52:18","date_gmt":"2011-03-22T22:52:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/?p=2054"},"modified":"2011-03-22T17:52:18","modified_gmt":"2011-03-22T22:52:18","slug":"havent-we-heard-this-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/havent-we-heard-this-before","title":{"rendered":"Haven&#8217;t we heard this before&#8230;?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/science-environment-12811197\">Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;The idea is pretty simple,&#8221; said Richard Wiener of the Research  Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It posits that social groups that have more members are  going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups  have a social status or utility.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;For example in languages, there can be greater utility or  status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in  Peru, and similarly there&#8217;s some kind of status or utility in being a  member of a religion or not.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Dr Wiener continued: &#8220;In a large number of modern secular  democracies, there&#8217;s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves  as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%,  and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was  60%.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model,  adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of  membership of the &#8220;non-religious&#8221; category.<\/p>\n<p>They found, <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1012.1375\">in a study published online<\/a>,  that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied,  suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them.<\/p>\n<p>And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the punch line&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>However, Dr Wiener told the conference that the team was  working to update the model with a &#8220;network structure&#8221; more  representative of the one at work<strong><em> in the world.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says &#8220;The idea is pretty simple,&#8221; said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona. &#8220;It posits that social groups that have more members are going &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/havent-we-heard-this-before\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[331,567],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-popular-culture"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2054"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2055,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054\/revisions\/2055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}