Why is religious devotion, personally and nationally, more prevalent with poor people

Opiate of the Masses? Or what?

 

Those who are less fortunate have more to be stressed and worried about and asking for a higher power for help gets them through it.

 

Pretty much.
Hope, even false hope, keeps people going when they would just rather give up on everything.

 

Those who are less fortunate have fewer options in life, and faith is often a last resort - for social groups, even if not for all of the individuals within those groups. Also, lack of education correlates strongly with lack of material success, cultural isolation, and options for improving your own life; and the Bible Belt (the darkest green) is clearly shown in this map to match up well with the old Confederacy, which was left in a state of extreme poverty for several generations after the Civil War.

Since the map was color coded by states rather than counties, you can't see that the Bible Belt also includes much of southern Virginia and southern West Virginia, as well as the area around Colorado Springs, CO, but it does not include the extreme southern parts of the Old South states that touch the Gulf of Mexico, or towns that are a part of the Mississippi River culture. Also, the Atlanta metro area is quite secular, having accumulated an enormous number of well-educated and successful people.

 

religion is their beautiful art

 

Religion gives them hope, it gives poorer people a reason in life. They have hope, that god will save them and if they are faithful to god in this life time they will be rewarded when they die.

 

i find the majority of the financially richest people in the world ta be the poorest people you could ever meet, in all the things that money can't buy. and i find the majority of the poorest people financially, ta be the richest people you could can meet.also i've often wondered why the word faith is always only used in the context of religious association.faith just means belief!and a person dose'nt havta be religious or even believe in a god ta have faith.i have loadsa faith/belief! in those i love an trust as they do in me.i believe in love.real love.unconditional love.thats the only real kind that exists.it costs nothing.it charges nothing.and its not for sale an can't be bought.so it all levels out nicely in the end,some people are more fortunate in some ways than other ways, an vice versa.but at the end of the day i guess it all depends on what every individual person considers ta be fortunate.and belief in yourself is probably one the greatest treasures of all.if not the most.faith/belief! belongs to everyone.not just the religious.

 

Link please. I would like to post that elsewhere.

 

Easy--financially rich people have more toys and more things to distract themselves with so they don't have to think too deeply. Not saying that nonreligious don't think deeply, or that religious people necessarily think deeply. It's just that the more you surround yourself with material objects, the easier it is to lose sight of the organic side of life.

There is also an element of dependency in many religions (at least Christianity)--to grow in faith, you must learn to rely on God, rather than on yourself. That is, the super-ego is superior to the ego. And it's easy to rely on God when you struggle to meet your most basic needs. That's why Jesus said to the rich man to sell all of his possessions and follow him.

Not that it matters, but I kind of resent the phrase that "religion is the opiate of the masses." Religion gets a bad rap, and certainly a lot of it is justified. But I think people forget that even if you didn't have religion, people would still numb/distract themselves with whatever else they can--drugs/alcohol, TV, video games, sports, shopping, etc. In other words, there is a deeper flaw within humanity that hides behind the mask of religion--take the mask away, and the problem is still there, it will just take another form.

 

How many rich people do you know personally? I don't know much about them, except for the public actions of a few.

A very common rationalization among religious people is to think, "Anybody who isn't like me is spiritually poor." Maybe they need to assume that, to feel better about themselves. Or maybe they have been told that by religious leaders who want more followers. People like to be told that they are superior to others in some important way.

Also, where do you think you could go to find a group of wealthy people so large that it could significantly alter the results of a random survey like the one in the OP? Those results shown on the map almost entirely reflect the views of the middle class and working class in every location, because they dominate all random surveys.

Did you notice that Brazil is the most prosperous country to show one of the darker shades of green? That shows a social time lag. Brazil and China (not surveyed) are among the most recent countries to achieve widespread prosperity. It will take a generation or two for their societies to adjust to this, as it has in the American Southeast, because of family influences.

That's a very condescending and arrogant assumption. I've heard it a lot from preachers who don't want anyone to take a serious look at any other point of view.

 

No clue I would be more on the poor side and I have no desire to devote myself to any religion nor do most of the other people in a similar financial situation I've met. I guess some people turn to religion when things are hard though don't know why it does not seem to do a lot of good.

 

Education.

My high school biology teacher refused to teach evolution because of her personal beliefs, and somehow she got away with this. I went to high school in a dark green state.

I don't think it has anything to do with poor people needing something to believe in. Its education or lack thereof.

If a society has no clue about evolution, has no clue about the universe and the physical nature of said universe, they'll use other ideas to fill their lack of knowledge.

 

Um, if you would read more than just my first sentence, you would see that I clarify that I'm NOT suggesting all religious people think deeply or that non-religious people don't. Speaking of education....it's called Reading Comprehension.

 

I'll try to find a local remedial reading class, then I'll hire a lawyer and sue the university that gave me a degree.

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Either you stand behind the sentence that you posted, or you don't. What's it going to be? :toetap05:

 

I stand behind the PARAGRAPH that I wrote. You completely misconstrued what I wrote by selecting a single sentence out of context. The answer to your question is right there, I don't know how to make this more simple.

 

It's our culture. Most of the poorest countries are also not of western culture. For us religion is separated from daily life, and from normal life in general. Whereas in those places, there is no way to extricate religion from culture, or to have one without the other. So I'd argue that it's not simply that poor people need a God to get them through the hard times, that's a rather western idea.

Just my $0.02.

 

she did'nt mean it that way karen.she was saying something else.what she said made sense.

 

I want to address this from an intellectual perspective, not an emotional one.

I’m in a Marketing group and got my start doing a lot of market research and on-site investigation. The tools I used at that time make me ask a few questions. That’s not to say your conclusion is wrong that religion is practiced more in impoverished areas, just that the facts may be misconstrued.

First, what is the source of the data? The indication is a Gallup Poll. While Gallup is respected, what was the purpose of their original survey when they conducted it? One needs to see the purpose, the questions, and the data collected. If their survey was specifically to tie religious practice to economic affluence, your conclusion may be correct. If they were studying religious practice from a purely geographic perspective, which I suspect is the case, then your conclusion may not be correct. In the former case, the study would be designed to validate or invalidate your comment. In the latter, one would need an overlay of economic strength and growth to take it to the next level. Whenever a credible group performs a survey, there’s a lot of work that goes into developing the questions so accurate conclusions can be made. The goal is to keep it short, but have checks and counterchecks to ensure how someone responds to one question is consistent with how they answer another. That’s why you often feel like you’re answering the same question in a different way – you are!

Simply stating geographic practices are tied to economic status discounts other factors. Does climate play a role? Okay, probably not, but the darkest green areas in the U.S. and globally are also in the most temperate, Sounds crazy, but again, there’s no data to support or invalidate that extension. Another question is how do political factors fit in? Practicing religion was strongly discouraged in the former U.S.S.R. and China as well. Is their light yellow/white color the result of economic factors or government pressure?

One friend I have on HF often raves about oppressive religious practice where she lives (Bible Belt). That’s part of the dark green region. Is that heavy sentiment caused by economic factors or the long-standing regional culture? True some of those areas are suffering financially, but that hasn’t always been the case. Some of the Bible Belt areas were thriving up until the past couple of decades. I think you would have seen strong religious tendencies even when that area flourished. How does that figure into your conclusion? One of the hardest hit areas recently by the economy is the Detroit area, yet Michigan only ranks as “Average” in religious practice.

All I’m saying is one has to be careful interpreting data. Things aren’t always as obvious as they initially appear.

 

Very true. The road to financial success is littered with the wreckage of companies that put too much faith into raw data from surveys, without properly processing it through the filters of common sense insights and sound judgment. As you surely know very well, there is a huge difference between proving a correlation and proving a cause and effect relationship. Some studies do a better job than others at uncovering what people think right now, but they tend to be equally terrible at figuring out why people think it. Why? Because people often honestly don't know why their opinions are what they are, making it difficult to uncover their reasons by questioning them, no matter how cleverly it is done.

On the particular subject of religion, the time lag between cause and effect (due to family and social influences) makes it extremely hard to draw any firm conclusions. The Soviet Union has not been around to enforce official atheism since 1989, but its influence may be felt for generations. (No data from China was available for the map.) Likewise, the postwar poverty of the Old South was mitigated in the 1970's and '80's by industrial relocations out of the Rust Belt, but the social impact of this was far from instant. And the state of Utah reflects a unique historical situation that most Americans understand fairly well. Its physical climate is similar to that of neighboring Nevada, but its social and religious climate could hardly be more different.

I also see in these maps a correlation between religious activity and population density. This is inconclusive, since population density also correlates well with prosperity.

I think it is worthy of note that extremely high levels of prosperity do not correspond geographically with absolute atheism, indicating that we are only dealing with degrees of religiosity here. This goes along with something most of us have consistently observed (mostly via television and books), that well-educated and worldly people do not spend a lot of time and effort attaching superstitious, supernatural significance to every single word, thought, and action, unlike what is commonly seen in the most backwards and isolated regions of the world.

 

Because poor people are less proud?