03-02-2009, 08:27 PM
Quote:Have you considered that increased religious freedom, over time, leads to declining religiosity? It seems abundantly clear looking at a world map coloured by religious belief that the freest countries are the least religious, and contrariwise, that the least free are the most religious.
Indeed, and in the Netherlands this 'having no problems with another mans religion' was of course partly caused by our economy. In our golden age capitalism grew because we wanted to do business with everybody, and everybody could come to use and do business. No very surprisingly this went hand in hand with great advances in science. Of course after (and before) that there came times with more religious pressure (invasions by the spanish, the french, the germans). In the 20th century we started with a funny thing called verzuiling or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation in english. All kinds of different groups that probably didn't like eachother that much were all having their own political parties, TV broadcast organisations, newspapers etc.
I heard stories from the 60s were youth from catholic villages would often fight with youth from the nexct protestant village.....nothing serious though.
A system were the leaders (elite) of all groups would normally cooperate to keep things together while the people would have their quarrels. I guess when the 60s came things changed because of the love and peace generation.
Quote:That seems overwhelmingly more likely than the implication you seem to be dancing around, which is that declining religiosity must be due to (or, more charitably, leads to) increased intolerance of religious freedom.
-Jester
Indeed, in Holland at least the wise people would always manage and make and keep Holland a prosperous country, but I think this is more despite of the religious people than because of them.
Now of course we have our problems with the Islamic pillar (although I am not sure which part is real problem and which part is populism from right wing politicians....it will be a mix of the two).
The people from countries like Morocco have never gone through a process like we went through in western europe.
All in all, and I say this again, I think religious groups don't have to worry about a thing, the atheists are the ones that see their freedom in danger. But this has been like this for hundreds of years so I don't forsee problems because of this.