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Japan, the UK, Canada, South Korea, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, France and Uruguay (where the majority of citizens have European roots) are all places where religion was important just a century or so ago, but that now report some of the lowest belief rates in the world. Capitalism, access to technology and education also seems to correlate with a corrosion of religiosity in some populations, he adds.
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“Security in society seems to diminish religious belief,” Zuckerman says. So not surprisingly, nations that report the highest rates of atheism tend to be those that provide their citizens with relatively high economic, political and existential stability. Part of religion’s appeal is that it offers security in an uncertain world. Scholars are still trying to tease out the complex factors that drive an individual or a nation toward atheism, but there are a few commonalities. It’s impossible to predict the future, but examining what we know about religion – including why it evolved in the first place, and why some people chose to believe in it and others abandon it – can hint at how our relationship with the divine might play out in decades or centuries to come. While atheists certainly are not the majority, could it be that these figures are a harbinger of things to come? Assuming global trends continue might religion someday disappear entirely? According to a Gallup International survey of more than 50,000 people in 57 countries, the number of individuals claiming to be religious fell from 77% to 68% between 20, while those who self-identified as atheist rose by 3% – bringing the world’s estimated proportion of adamant non-believers to 13%. “There’s absolutely more atheists around today than ever before, both in sheer numbers and as a percentage of humanity,” says Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and author of Living the Secular Life. In some countries, openly acknowledged atheism has never been more popular. And it’s an outlook that could be gaining momentum – despite its lack of cheer. A growing number of people, millions worldwide, say they believe that life definitively ends at death – that there is no God, no afterlife and no divine plan.