It found that while about 25 percent identified as being atheist or agnostic, believers and non-believers were very likely to both agree about the severity of environmental problems and the danger of political corruption in the world.

Religious belief did play a role in attitudes on several other social issues, the survey said.

For example, atheists tended to support the legalisation of prostitution and surrogacy, while Catholics were more likely to reject the death penalty and the justification of war compared to people of other religions and atheists.

Results of the survey, titled, "Young People: Expectations, Ideals, Beliefs," were released Feb. 29 by the Footprints Research Group of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome together with seven other universities around the world.

The group said it wanted to look at young people from an international point of view since the vast majority of research on young people usually takes place on a national level.

And it wanted a "broad perspective" from a Christian anthropological view about their values, the reasons for their decisions, their religious practices and perceptions of the Church.

The survey with 37 questions was conducted in Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, the Philippines, Spain and the United Kingdom from Nov. 16 to Dec. 11, 2023.

It sampled at least 600 young people from each of the eight countries for a total of 4,889 individuals between the ages of 18 and 29. The margin of error was plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.

Belief in God

About 73 percent of those surveyed said they believe in God while 8 percent were "searching to believe in God," it said.

However, the majority of those surveyed agreed on a sliding scale that "it isn't necessary to believe in God to have good values," with the highest number of people disagreeing with that statement being young people in Kenya and the Philippines.

At least three-quarters of those surveyed believe sin exists and that parents should pass religion on to their children. Those in sharpest disagreement to both statements were in Spain and the U.K.

Of those who said they stopped believing in God, the majority said it happened during middle school and high school.

The survey found there were two most frequent reasons for no longer believing in God.

These were feeling God was a "psychological refuge" or "substitute" for what cannot be explained or understood, and knowing a lot of "bad" believers, leading them "to understand that religion doesn't help people to be better."

Regular attendance at religious services and frequent daily prayer were highest among young people in Kenya and the Philippines.

Importance of going to Mass

"With regard to Mass attendance, many young Catholics defend their position that denies the correlation between going to Mass and being a good Christian," according to a press release by the pontifical university.

Those who reported not attending Mass regularly and 69% of those who said they do "share the belief that being a good Christian is not necessarily contingent upon Mass attendance." Read more

• Carol Glatz writes for Catholic News Service.

"It's a very strange sample because it inconsiderably includes less than our population percentages of Maori and Pacifika, and that may have actually impacted on the result - in that those two groups, particularly the Pacific group, tend to record much higher levels of religious beliefs and activities," he said.

According to the study, which surveyed more than 1000 New Zealanders, about 33 percent identify with Christianity, 35 percent were non-religious, 20 percent spiritual but not religious, and 67 percent were non-Christians.

Morris said more people were finding fulfilment in other spiritual practices without the need to be part of a religion.

"The work we've done with our students at Victoria show that large numbers of students who record no religion - in terms of a census category and were reflected in this survey - meditate, pray and [have] very strong ecological concerns, which they see as spiritual but not religious.

"My students are very open to Maori spirituality, te hunga wairua and at playing a role in individual and New Zealand's public life."

He said various forms of media have also helped shape New Zealand's views on different religions.

"People also have - through media, social media and mainstream media - much more awareness of the positive and negative things of religions, but just a variety of religious and spiritual positions.

"So, in that sense, they're conscious of a set of choices and a cultural openness where none of these things are coercive.

"They're choices. You can select to be religious or not religious."

Source

• radionz.co.nz
• Image:nzfaithandbeliefstudy.files.wordpress.com

To what degree do you understand the key principles of the world's major religions?

Judaism. Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism?

And how did you develop that knowledge?

Through school? Your parents? The media? Your church, perhaps? Or maybe through your own research?

I'll put up my hand and say that when I entered my 20s, I was religiously ignorant. So ignorant.

I had almost no knowledge of religion, and it was only when I studied journalism that I began to develop a thirst for religious knowledge.

What was central to the Troubles in Ireland?

Why was the Middle East in such a mess?

Why do some Catholics not eat meat on a Friday?

And what on earth is Ramadan?

Early in the 2000s, I moved to Dublin and over the course of the next eight years, lived in Ireland and England.

And I really had to swot up on religion then.

Religion in Ireland was central to life, and later, working at Sky News in London, I realised that so much of what I was reporting on required a sound knowledge of religion - be it in the Middle East, the Russian-Chechen situation, the savage conflicts raging up the eastern coast of Africa, and central Asia too - Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Although 84 per cent of the world identifies with a faith or religion, in this secular country, we receive little or no religious education.

Some parents fear religious studies. I think they're concerned their children will become indoctrinated.

And I was one of those parents, but I'm not anymore.

I want my son to study religion as part of his school curriculum, so that he understands it.

I want him to develop a framework by which he understand other people's values, beliefs or traditions.

Because if he doesn't develop that knowledge, then how will he judge the validity of claims made by the likes of social influencers, politicians and the media?

And when we don't understand something, we fear it - right? Continue reading

• Rachel Smalley is a radio host for Newstalk ZB.

"Your religious expertise should be invaluable," the president and his chief of staff tell Dr. McCord when they offer him the job. When he replies with, "My background is really more medieval," they chuckle. "Well, so is our enemy," the chief of staff responds.

I had to laugh. I majored in religion in college, have a graduate degree in theology, and currently work at U.S. Catholic magazine. The thought of myself or any of my classmates, colleagues, or professors leading a super-secret spy team to single-handedly bring down ISIS is, to put it mildly, a bit of a stretch.

But then I read real-life Secretary of State John Kerry's essay in America. "If I headed back to college today, I would major in comparative religions rather than political science," he says. "Religious actors and institutions are playing an influential role in every region of the world and on nearly every issue central to U.S. foreign policy."

Apparently, television isn't as far from reality as I thought. And while the thought of my theology professors as super spies is still a little much, I'm starting to see what Kerry meant.

Before all the dense theological tomes, before the immersion into history and biblical studies and the classes in pastoral care, liturgy, and public speaking, I entered college as a chemistry and environmental studies major. I wanted to save the world—even if my 18-year-old self hadn't quite figured out quite what that would look like.

When I was informed I had to take a first-year writing seminar, I chose the one that seemed to overlap best with my chosen majors—"Religion and the Environment." It wasn't long before I was hooked. I had never considered how people's faiths affect their actions in the world or how our religious beliefs can motivate us to advocate for climate justice or to deny climate change altogether. Continue reading

• Emily Sanna is the web editor and an associate editor at U.S. Catholic.

International researchers, including the University of Auckland's Associate Professor Quentin Atkinson, have published the results of their study in the journal Nature.

They found people who believe their god is more punitive and knowledgeable behave more honestly and generously towards others who share their religion.

The relationship between supernatural beliefs and cooperativeness could not be accounted for by a wide range of other variables such as gender, age, education, material insecurity and number of children.

The research took place across eight communities from Brazil, Siberia, Tanzania, Vanuatu, Fiji and Mauritius.

The religious attitudes of nearly 600 people were surveyed.

Their belief systems ranged from Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism to more localised beliefs in spirits and deities.

Participants included hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, herders and farmers, and people living in modern economies who earned wages or ran businesses.

The study used behavioural economic games and ethnographic interviews.

The games included elements of random chance and the ability to skew results to benefit either the player, other individuals or groups.

The study found that overall, participants who rated their gods highly as all-knowing and concerned with moral behaviour allocated more money to people who believed in the same god.

This was the case even if their co-believers were strangers from another community.

But it wasn't true for those who shared beliefs in local spirits and deities not considered so "all-knowing" or concerned with moral behaviour.

Dr Atkinson said that the relatively dramatic rise in human cooperation since the advent of agriculture isn't explained by genetic evolution.

"It turns out that putting the fear of god into us may have had a lot to do with it," he said.

"These gods acted as a kind of social engineering so that people who believed in a morally-concerned god were more likely to follow the rules of the game and give money to their fellow believers over themselves and their village."

Sources

• New Zealand Herald
• Voxy
• Image: The Odyssey Online

Canon Ellis, whose initials 'RC' were a cross he had to bear, was a liberal on most things, including sex, but his liberalism did not extend to the Roman Catholic faith which he could not stomach. He was a gentler man than Ian Paisley, though cut from the same cloth in matters sectarian.

My declaration that I no longer believed in God did not faze the Canon one bit. His brilliant son Stuart had, like me, found and then lost religion. The university did that to impressionable young minds.

"You can," RC said, "continue to attend church, sing in the choir and teach Sunday School. Just don't say The Lord's Prayer or take communion and confine your teaching to the historical account of Jesus' life."

I spent a day or two considering this solution before deciding that it really wasn't feasible for the person of conscience I considered myself to be.

I'm 77 now and still an atheist . I don't believe in God or an afterlife. When you're dead you're dead. That's it. It's one among many reasons why I don't believe in capital punishment - no second chance to put things right.

I have no interest in converting other people to my way of thinking, not least because of the comfort my mother's belief in God brought her during a lonely life and an agonising death from cancer. And I have very little time for proselytising atheists most of whom seem to spend their time railing against a creature they don't believe exists. The stupidity of that position beggars belief.

But the harm that belief in a supernatural being has done throughout history and continues to do today cannot be ignored or set aside. The atrocities being committed by Isis today are justified as the will of Allah in precisely the same way that the atrocities of the crusades or the Reformation or the counter-reformation or recent violence against non-Christians and homosexuals in Uganda are justified as representing the will of the Christian God. Torturing people who disagree with your interpretation of the wishes of a deity, chopping off their heads or burning them alive - none of these is an invention of Isis.

And because such barbarism relies on the belief that it is the will of a higher power - 'not what I want but what God or Allah wants' - its practice is impervious to rational attack, as its perpetrators are impervious to rational persuasion. And therein lies the power of Isis which offers a whole new set of rules and mores, sanctioned by Allah, to legitimise the most horrendous crimes perpetrated by the disaffected and disillusioned among us.

I'm inclined on the whole to believe that religious belief has been and remains a force for ill rather than a force for good in the world. This may be because the history of religion in Northern Ireland where I was brought up is characterised by intolerance of the beliefs of others, often violently expressed.

But I think it goes beyond that. There is simply no empirical evidence for the existence of a divine being and therefore no rational justification for such a belief. In Christian theology God is conveniently invisible. "No man," the Bible asserts, "has seen God".

The harm which I see emanating from religion lies less in religious belief itself than in the scope which the abandonment of rational thought in favour of religious dogma gives for irrational, potentially anti-social and, at the outer margins, murderous or genocidal behaviour.

I'm something of a fan of the current Pope, but it's pretty hard to ignore the role of Catholic dogma on birth control and abortion in condemning entire populations to generational poverty. It may be consoling to think that your reward will be in Heaven, but what if Heaven is a myth? And what if there is no God, no Allah, no rewarding virgins at the gates of paradise, no paradise? What if death is final?

Well, there's comfort, I suppose in never discovering that inconvenient truth, but it does reduce the slaughter of the innocent in the name of God or Allah to what it really is - a horrendous crime against humanity in the name of religion.

And worse, it may be dangerous now even to express such an opinion. The ditch is narrow between us and our Aussie neighbours.

Immediately after the Christchurch earthquake, Peter Beck, the Dean of Christchurch Cathedral, and a man I greatly admire, was asked by by a parishioner, "Where is God?" His reply included this phrase:

"God is weeping with those who weep."

He was then asked: "Yes, but where was God when offices pancaked and burned and hundreds died?

He replied: "Well, we live in a dynamic, creating planet that's doing its thing. For whatever reason, our forbears chose to build this city on this place. They didn't know we were on the fault line. God doesn't make bad things happen to good people. We make our own choices about what we do."

This exchange angered me greatly and I wrote an intemperate post in reply. It included this:

"Every year millions of people die in natural disasters. Every year bad things happen to good people... Peter tells us it's not God's doing. 'God', he tells us, 'is weeping with those who weep.' That's nice. A sympathetic, do-nothing God. A sympathetic did nothing God."

Looking back, I can see that I wasn't just angry with Peter, I was angry with God. As I suggested earlier, it's a trap we atheists all too easily fall into - blaming a god we don't believe in and whose existence we deny.

I fall into that trap pretty regularly myself. Must try harder!

- Brian Edwards
Brian is one of New Zealand's most respected broadcasters and writers. This piece originally appeared on Brian Edwards Media. Used with permission.

Image: NBR (edited)

Perhaps, it suggests, we've been looking at "god" the wrong way. The new science of religion shows religious belief as more subtle and interesting than atheist prejudices have allowed. Belief seems to be ingrained in human beings - which is just as well, the magazine concedes, for "without it, we would still be living in the Stone Age".

"Religion is deeply etched in human nature, and cannot be dismissed as a product of ignorance, indoctrination or stupidity. Until secularists recognise that, they are fighting a losing battle."

Indeed, despite confident predictions of religion's imminent demise, "religion is much more likely to persist than science".

The magazine takes it as a given that we should all want to loosen religion's grip. This, despite evidence "that a belief in god or gods does appear to encourage people to be nice to one another. Humans clearly don't need religion to be moral, but it helps".

In his new book Religion for Atheists, the British writer and "committed atheist" Alain de Botton makes the case for not throwing religion out with the holy water.

De Botton starts from the assumption that religious belief is "of course" nonsense, but departs from the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens in finding that religion is "not entirely daft".

To the contrary, religion's ability to "promote morality [and] engender a spirit of community" can be quite useful, provided one jettisons God from the equation.

De Botton wants to have his unbelief and religion, too. It is possible, he writes, to be an atheist and still find religion "sporadically useful, interesting and consoling". Continue reading

Source

• Tapu Misa in The New Zealand Herald
• Image: Studio Edirisa