Another rather lazy assumption was dynamited later in the day by David Voas, the sociologist behind the informative British Religion in Numbers. He showed us any number of graphs showing a steady falling off of religious belief in England over the past 50 or 60 years, but ended with one in the shape of a shallow X. One line, sloping down from left to right, showed the familiar decline in religious belief. The other, sloping up over the same decades, showed the corresponding rise in a faith in life after death.
So what we have now is a country where large numbers of people repudiate religion, but are anyway convinced that there is some form of life after death.
The persistence of superstition in an irreligious Britain
Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger reports that a woman starved to death after embarking on a spiritual diet that required her to stop eating or drinking and live off sunlight alone.
The Zurich newspaper reported Wednesday that the unnamed Swiss woman in her fifties decided to follow the radical fast in 2010 after viewing an Austrian documentary about an Indian guru who claims to have lived this way for 70 years.
Tages-Anzeiger says there have been similar cases of self-starvation in Germany, Britain and Australia.
One thing I’ve learned to watch out for is the atheism naturalism materialism shell game.
Take Denmark. I’ll now and then hear Denmark described as a very atheistic country, which is possible. The problem is that an atheist is not necessarily a naturalist. The 2005 Eurobarometer poll reported that 31% of Danish citizens responded that “they believe there is a god”, 49% answered that “they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force” and 19% that “they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, god, or life force”. (Wiki ‘religion in denmark’ source.)
That’s ~80% who believe in God, or some sort of spirit or life force. As I said, it’s possible that atheism is prevalent in Denmark. But naturalism? Apparently not.