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Notes:
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The purpose of this paper is to advance a hypothesis that might explain the decline of religious
belief and practice among the so-called WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic)
populations. The main point of this paper is to postulate a causal relationship between two variables that
appear to be significantly correlated: on one hand, the decline of religious belief and practice that has been
observed in those populations during the twentieth century, and especially since the second half of that
century; on the other, the remarkable growth of their life span during that period. The factor that the author
proposes as an explanation for that correlation is the causal link relating to the experience of the death of
significant others and belief in the supernatural in such a way that the more that experience happens to
be relevant in a population’s day-to-day life the more that population will be prone to entertain beliefs in
the supernatural, and conversely, the less prominent that experience happens to be, the less inclined that
population will be to uphold those beliefs. |
