Tag: religion for atheists

Notes from Pew study on how demographics are changing world religion

Expect to see more writing on religion and spirituality here. While crypto investment is still my current obsession, I’ve shifted that content over to Breaking Bitcoin and an email newsletter.

There is tremendous wisdom and value stored in the world’s major faiths. Huston Smiths calls them the great wisdom traditions and he’s not wrong. For me this interest snowballed with Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists book [Amazon]. Fwiw I don’t consider myself an atheist. Here are some of my blog posts about his book.

I hope in the future to join or launch a lifelong project to identify, collect, and share all of the world’s religious wisdom with all of the world’s people. And the best sort of wisdom is when you are not just reading but doing. Not only reading but practicing. I call this loosely the soul habit and have written briefly about it before. Let me know if this interests you.

The Pew Research Center regularly publishes valuable survey data and analyses on how religion is practiced and how it’s changing around the world. Here are my notes from a recent study on demographics. Here is the Pew analysis and full report.

NOTES

Islam will become the most populous religion in the world because, simply put, Muslims have more babies

In the period between 2010 and 2015, births to Muslims made up an estimated 31% of all babies born around the world – far exceeding the Muslim share of people of all ages in 2015 (24%).

As a group, nonbelievers and the unaffiliated will continue to decline as a percentage of the world population. This is driven primarily by people leaving Christianity. Other groups unable to keep pace with global population growth: Buddhism, Judaism, and folk religions

…the religiously unaffiliated population is heavily concentrated in places with aging populations and low fertility, such as China, Japan, Europe and North America.

Between 2015 and 2020, religious “nones” are projected to experience a net gain of 7.6 million people due to religious switching; people who grew up as Christians are expected to make up the overwhelming majority of those who switch into the unaffiliated group

The relative influence of Muslims is expected to increase in sub-Saharan African and decrease in Asia

By 2060, 27% of the global Muslim population is projected to be living in the region, up from 16% in 2015. By contrast, the share of Muslims living in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to decline over the period from 61% to 50%.

The youngest major religions are, in order, Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity

The median ages of Muslims (24 years) and Hindus (27) are younger than the median age of the world’s overall population (30), while the median age of Christians (30) matches the global median. All the other groups are older…

China is home to 61% of the world’s unaffiliated population as of 2015 (!)

3 books that changed my life and I hope they help you, too: Power of Habit, Spark, and Religion for Atheists

3 Books: Power of Habit, Spark, Religion for Atheists

In the last few years, there were 3 books that profoundly influenced me and together pushed me in a whole new direction, with respect to both life philosophy and career interests. As part of writing Habit Driven Life, a series of essays that I might turn into a book, I wanted to share these three life changers with you.

The first was Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit [Amazon aff]. Here’s my cheatsheet for it. Charles’s book taught me that if your life is a house, then habits are its brick and mortar. Brick by brick, layer by layer, habit by habit, you construct the building that is your life. Your creation can be a wobbly shack or it can be a rock walled mansion. It all depends on your habits.

The book was filled with mental lightbulbs. One lightbulb that shined brightest for me was a concept known as keystone habits. Like the keystone which is placed at the top of a stone arch, holding the arch together, keystone habits are behaviors upon which other behaviors rely. For example, in a group of good friends, there is often one person who does all the planning and organizing. Without her there might not be a group, or the group would socialize far less often. Keystone habits work like this. An example of a keystone habit for me is daily exercise. Every day that I can go for a long run, I am happier and more relaxed. I have a better appetite. I sleep better. I can almost feel the mental cobwebs being dusted off and wiped away with each mile.

After reading The Power of Habit, I began to think of a day as just a sequence of habits. If you haven’t programmed your habits, then your habits are programming you. Habits create outcomes, good or bad. If you don’t wake up early and feel refreshed, it’s because you don’t have the habit of going to bed early and sleeping under the right conditions (such as a very dark and quiet room). If you don’t build your favorite side project, it’s because you haven’t created the right routines in your schedule and in your environment to do so. If you want to accomplish your dreams, you absolutely MUST set the right habits.

Some of us are lucky enough to have good habits from childhood, learned from our parents or teachers or coaches. But everyone can improve their habits. And good habits, no matter how sturdy, can break, fall apart, require maintenance. Just like a house.

Building the right habits requires experimentation and patience and, above all, repetition. You simply make your bed each morning, morning after morning. A year later, one random morning, you’ll leave your bedroom and walk into the kitchen. You’ll have a moment where you wonder, wait a minute – did I make my bed? And you’ll walk back to your bedroom to discover that the bed’s already been made.

You, my friend, have got yourself a new habit.

It’s a great feeling.

Here’s aspiring comedian Brad Isaac telling a story about Jerry Seinfeld and the habit that helped him become the world’s richest standup comic:

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day.

“After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is to not break the chain.”

**

The second book was John Ratey’s Spark [Amazon aff]. Here’s its cheatsheet. Spark convinced me that regular aerobic exercise could alleviate and cure almost everything that began to plague me in my late 20s: growing social anxiety, a sometimes depressive mindset, the heavy lethargy that enveloped me like a fast moving fog on many afternoons. The book provided just the – spark – I needed to get out of the house and run. And as I mentioned above, running has rewired my life.

Spark is the sort of book that’s like a wise grandfather. It tells you what you kinda-sorta-already know, but finally, for the first time, you truly listen. Your heart and soul open, and the book gets into you, and it tweaks and adjusts and cleans things like a mechanic.

**

The third and final book was Religion for Atheists [Amazon aff]. The author Alain de Botton asks, how can we live better by studying the world’s enduring religions? He submits, in convincing fashion, that religious traditions from Buddhism to Judaism are enduring sources of wisdom and self-help. I’m a big fan of Alain’s work.

As you study organized religions, digging through and within their infinite layers, you see that each tradition is a massive collections of habits. From prayer to sacrament, from weekly sermon to annual pilgrimage, religion-as-institution just might be the most enduring and comprehensive collection of habits we’ve ever assembled. Religion is belief, and religion is ritual. And ritual is a collection of habits, in much the same way a football team is a collection of players.

A devout Muslim prays at five precise times each and every day, in a highly prescribed and structured manner. What actions do I perform five times a day? Only the most fundamental ones: eat, drink, use the restroom, check my email. Talk about power and influence. Hinduism has been around for 4K years. What else but the most essential technologies have lasted this long? The written word? The wheel? Certainly not the oldest American corporation (DuPont, about 200 years old) or even the world’s oldest university (depending on who you ask, about 1000 years old).

Now of course religion can go very wrong. But so can any other set of powerful and lasting beliefs. After all, democracy and capitalism are two pillars upon which America today stands, but it was these same engines that propelled us to take our land, with violence, from the very people who had been living there, while also capturing and importing millions of others to serve as slave labor for centuries. Two enormous tragedies from which we’ve yet to fully recover. Both driven by, and justified by, the ideologies upon which we’re so reliant today.

But I digress.

Upon finishing Religion for Atheists, I downloaded and read the Bhagavad Gita, in awe of its lyric beauty and incomparable scope. I started to attend church, which is a fulfilling but not-yet-regular habit. I deepened my meditation practice. Slowly, most importantly, I began to have faith: not in a powerful, bearded man who sits high above the clouds and renders judgment, but rather in a force that is both far simpler and yet more magical. The simple belief that there is something greater than us in the world. By us, I mean you and I.

The single danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings – much to their detriment – are at risk of taking psychological centre stage – Alain de Botton

If Power of Habit gave me understanding and Spark gave me inspiration, Religion for Atheists provided purpose. I felt driven to understand and share religious wisdom, wisdom that has, for the most part, been isolated and kept within silos.

I believe we can and should learn from all of the religious traditions. Whether you’re Catholic or agnostic, Hindu or Wiccan or atheist. Many people are already doing this, even if they don’t see it as such. From yoga to meditation to pilgrimage, from vegetarianism to tithing to universal compassion, religious ideas and rituals are everywhere in modern secular society. And everywhere being rebranded and reinvented for reasons that are as difficult to explain as they are easy to understand.

So these three books: Power of Habit, Spark, and Religion for Atheists. I hope you browse them, I hope you read them, I hope you enjoy them or at least are challenged by them. And I hope you let me know. Thanks!

38 powerful insights from Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton)

Alain de Botton is one of my favorite thinkers/writers/intellectuals. I’ve written about his work in the past, such as his TED talk on success and his book Religion for Atheists.

By now I’ve read and watched a lot of the content he’s put online, so I wanted to share some of my favorite insights across his work with you. So in no particular order…

(most of the below is paraphrase, with direct quotes in italics)

Alain de Botton on how to think more about sex

1. There’s nothing that is considered sexy that isn’t, with the wrong person, disgusting

2. The magic of oral sex is that it takes the dirtiest part of us and makes it clean. That part is accepted by another person

3. What turns us on? It’s often what’s missing…from our childhoods, our moms

4. Why do we have too little sex? It’s because the person we have sex with is someone we do too much other stuff with (in past, people had more specific gender and vocational roles but now, we do everything together)

Alain de Botton on success
on YouTube

5. Snobbery is when you know only a little bit about someone but draw much larger conclusions about them

6. We’re not materialistic, we live in a society where emotional rewards are pegged to material goods. So when you see a Ferrari driver, don’t criticize them for being greedy, instead, see them as somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love

7. We’ve done away with the caste system. We’re told anyone can achieve anything, which generates envy (envy is our dominant modern emotion)

8. What is envy? Envy is relatability. When you can’t relate to them, you can’t envy them

9. It’s bad enough to not get what you want. It’s even worse to get what you want, after all this hard work, only to realize it may not be what you wanted all along

Alain de Botton on status anxiety

10. Low-paying jobs are frowned upon not just because of the pay…but because of their perceived status. Vice-versa for high-paying jobs

11. In a “just” society like ours, we believe the rich deserve their success, but we also assume the poor deserve their failure (which makes it harder to tolerate our own mediocrity or lack of success)

12. Jesus and Socrates as great exemplars for being sacrificial and sticking to their beliefs

13. We want the respect of people who we don’t even respect

Alain de Botton on why pessimism is healthy

14. The problem with society is that, with the engines of science, technology, and commerce, we’ve taken such great strides as mankind that we forget pessimism’s usefulness in individuals, and in the day-to-day.

15. Ironically, the secular are least suited to cope because they believe we can achieve heaven on earth through Silicon Valley, Fortune 500s, university research, etc

16. Religions provide angels – forever young and beautiful – to worship, and our lovers instead to tolerate (whereas secular people are always complaining, “why can’t you be more perfect?”).

Alain de Botton’s talk at Google
on YouTube

17. We’ve offloaded making up our minds to things like social media and the news

18. News drives us insane with envy; envy is good, but we don’t extract its lessons

19. We need MORE bias in the news: GOOD bias, not false fairness

Alain de Botton on Socrates and self confidence
on YouTube

20. There are 5 steps to have a good thought:

Step 1. look for “plain common sense” statements
Step 2. try to find exceptions
Step 3. if an exception is found, that must mean statement is false or imprecise
Step 4. try to incorporate the exception into the original statement
Step 5. continue this process, keep finding exceptions, until it’s impossible to disprove

21. Socrates believed we can have an interesting philosophical conversation anywhere, on a street corner or at home or in a foreign place

22. Socrates had reservations about democracy (lived in Athenian democracy). He argued that just because the majority of people believe something doesn’t make it right. What matters is whether the argument is logical and reasonable, not whether the majority says so

Alain de Botton on La Rochefoucauld
Philosophers Mail

23. There are some people who would never have fallen in love, if they had not heard there was such a thing.

Alain de Botton on Epicurus on happiness
on YouTube

24. Happiness is important: it comes from friends (as permanent companions), freedom (Epicurus left city life to start a commune), and an analyzed life (to find the time and space for quiet thinking about our lives)

Alain de Botton on Schopenhauer and his views on love
on YouTube

25. Being hurt by rejection is to not fully understand the requirements of acceptance

26. Love has nothing to do with happiness, it’s all about procreation, the “Will to life” (like Nietzsche’s “Will to power”)

Alain de Botton on Nietzsche and hardship
on YouTube

27. One of the few philosophers who wrote about pain and hardship, he believed they were necessary evil for enjoyment and success

Alain de Botton on Montaigne on self-esteem

28. Animals often surpass us in wisdom. They are much more natural about their bodies

29. Every society has customs which create narrow minds. To counter it, travel widely

30. How can you test for wisdom? Ask questions such as:

What should one do when anxious?
What is a good parent?
How can you tell if one is in love or infatuated?

31. “even on the highest throne, we are seated, still, on our asses”

From Religion for Atheists

32. As John Stuart Mill, another Victorian defender of the aims of education, put it: ‘The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.’

33. We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

34. The single danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings – much to their detriment – are at risk of taking psychological centre stage

35. The modern world is not, of course, devoid of institutions. It is filled with commercial corporations of unparalleled size which have an intriguing number of organizational traits in common with religions. But these corporations focus only on our outer, physical needs, on selling us cars and shoes, pizzas and telephones. Religion’s great distinction is that while it has a collective power comparable to that of modern corporations pushing the sale of soap and mashed potatoes, it addresses precisely those inner needs which the secular world leaves to disorganized and vulnerable individuals.

36. Religions do not, as modern universities will, limit their teaching to a fixed period of time (a few years of youth), a particular space (a campus) or a single format (the lecture).

37. Comte…was convinced that humanity was still at the beginning of its history and that all kinds of innovation – however bold and far- fetched they might initially sound – were possible in the religious field, just as in the scientific one. […] The age he lived in, he asserted, afforded him a historic opportunity to edit out the absurdities of the past and to create a new version of religion which could be embraced because it was appealing and useful… He drew most heavily from Catholicism […] and also essayed occasional forays into the theology of Judaism, Buddhism and Islam.

38. Images of tranquillity and security haunt it: a particular job, social conquest or material acquisition always seems to hold out the promise of an end to craving. In reality, however, each worry will soon enough be replaced by another, and one desire by the next, generating a relentless cycle of what Buddhists call ‘grasping’, or upādāna in Sanskrit.

Why everyone should read some Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton @ TEDLet’s face it, we’re a pretty hypocritical country: we watch porn in record amounts but shun abortion; we drive Toyota Priuses but keep our lights on when we leave the house; we spend billions on diet books and fitness fads then stop by Wendy’s on the way home. It can overwhelm, at times.

I believe it’s partially driven by religion, or the lack thereof. Religious folk struggle to maintain their values in our sex-soaked, technology-obsessed culture; nonreligious folk (call them what you like: atheists, agnostics, the “spiritual but not religious”) struggle to find a sense of purpose, a greater good. We’re conflicted, caught between who we are and who we want to be (and believe). And hypocrisy – Greek for “acting of a theatrical part” – is the result.

That’s why I love reading Alain de Botton, and why I recommend his work. He’s chicken soup for the modern soul.

de Botton believes we’ve secularized, but have done so badly. In our abrupt, aggressive departure from religion, we’ve run away from home but are still wandering the streets without safety or shelter.

Instead of shunning religion, we should learn from it. We should, in the greatest sense of the word, steal pieces of it — for example, a belief in giving back, or love for neighbor and stranger — and make those pieces a part of our lives.

And the best part? It’s not just for nonbelievers: Christians can learn from Hindus, Buddhists can learn from Muslims, and so on.

His solution makes immediate, visceral sense. If humankind aspires to a true global village, this is the culture it must create.

de Botton is better-known in Europe than the States. They’re more secular, for one. His provocative titles, like “Religion for Atheists” or “Atheism 2.0”, would be dismissed forthwith here. Europe is also more removed, if by a small margin, from some of his critiques of what polisci students would call “American soft power.” Even his name is hard to pronounce (try saying “Botton” five times without hearing “bottom”).

But he’s prolific, he’s persuasive, and he’s profound. Start with his Twitter feed, a stream of seemingly simple self-help soundbites. Yes, he might be the intellectual man’s Tony Robbins, but there’s more substance, and nuance.

The bottom line: Alain de Botton has changed how I see the world and what I’d like to accomplish before I die.

The other author I’ve frequently praised on this blog is Haruki Murakami. There’s no obvious overlap with de Botton, not in style, format, or demographic, but they both peel back the layers of humankind, to place the emotional and logical pieces of our species into a broader tableau. Murakami’s tableau is a sensory, magical one; de Botton’s is an orderly, harmonious one.

Below, I’ve compiled a selection of my notes from his work, a sort of buffet-style entry to his arguments:

On status anxiety

  • It’s a problem today because 1) we don’t approve of people who receive their status by birth and 2) we believe status can be earned/achieved and therefore it is limitless
  • There are 2 types of self-help books: 1) the Tony Robbins kind, “become a billionaire by Sunday” and 2) how to deal with low self-esteem; they’re connected because if you’re not a billionaire by Saturday, you have self-esteem problems
  • Tocqueville, on his trip around the world, noted that envy would be the #1 emotion that Americans would suffer (as with most democratic, egalitarian societies)
  • In a “just” society like ours, the rich deserve their success, but the poor also deserve their failure (which makes it harder to tolerate our own mediocrity or lack of success)
  • Hundreds of years ago, if you saw a rich person, you would assume he/she was born into it or did something bad to get it; and in ancient Rome, your good fortune was due to the Gods, when something good happened to you, you’d thank God and bless him and sacrifice to him

On why pessimism is healthy

  • Problem with society is that, with the engines of science, technology, and commerce, mankind has taken such great strides that we forget pessimism’s usefulness in individuals, and in the day-to-day
  • The secular are least suited to cope because they believe we can achieve heaven on earth through things like Silicon Valley, Fortune 500s, university research
  • Religions provide angels – forever young and beautiful – to worship, and our lovers are instead meant to be tolerated (whereas secular people are always complaining, “why can’t you be more perfect?”)

On atheism and religion:

  • There’s much to admire about organized religion – the music, architecture, texts, rules, communities
  • Education has two goals – to learn important/technical skills, and to make better human beings
  • We are immensely forgetful beings, which is why religions on average remind people of things five times per day (whereas secular education rarely if ever reviews important lessons)
  • Secular world has religious equivalents, like museums, but they lack power and purpose
  • In 2011, the Catholic Church made $97B. Why is it so successful? Because it’s involved directly in many aspects of peoples’ lives, whereas the academic/intellectual world is more distant, preferring instead to publish books and lecture from afar
  • Religions are like good hosts at a party – bring people together, facilitate intros, help people make things happen

Some videos:

Some tweets:

Some quotes from Religion for Atheists (see here for a longer list):

We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.

I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illuminated manuscripts of the faiths.

In a restaurant no less than in a home, when the meal itself – the texture of the escalopes or the moistness of the courgettes – has become the main attraction, we can be sure that something has gone awry.

Religions teach us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober, but they also know that if they do not allow us to be or do otherwise every once in a while, they will break our spirit.

The one generalization we might venture to draw from the Judaeo-Christian approach to good behaviour is that we would be advised to focus our attention on relatively small-scale, undramatic kinds of misconduct. Pride, a superficially unobtrusive attitude of mind, was deemed worthy of notice by Christianity, just as Judaism saw nothing frivolous in making recommendations about how often married couples should have sex.

Why, then, does the notion of replacing religion with culture, of living according to the lessons of literature and art as believers will according to the lessons of faith, continue to sound so peculiar to us? Why are atheists not able to draw on culture with the same spontaneity and rigour which the religious apply to their holy texts?

The difference between Christian and secular education reveals itself with particular clarity in their respective characteristic modes of instruction: secular education delivers lectures, Christianity sermons. Expressed in terms of intent, we might say that one is concerned with imparting information, the other with changing our lives.

We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness.

The modern world is not, of course, devoid of institutions. It is filled with commercial corporations of unparalleled size which have an intriguing number of organizational traits in common with religions. But these corporations focus only on our outer, physical needs, on selling us cars and shoes, pizzas and telephones. Religion’s great distinction is that while it has a collective power comparable to that of modern corporations pushing the sale of soap and mashed potatoes, it addresses precisely those inner needs which the secular world leaves to disorganized and vulnerable individuals.

Thanks everyone. That was a long post but hope you found it useful. I’d love to hear what authors and thinkers inspire you. Also here is a much longer list of stuff I’m reading and highlighting if you’re into that sort of thing.