These deaths only occurred in nursing homes, and they all were at least 80 years old. However, keep in mind that Norway has only had 544 total pandemic deaths, while the USA sits at 427,635. Doing the math, the proportional equivalent in the U.S. would be 10,219 deaths. Well, I took the Moderna version, and, save for a bad sore throat that lasted only for a few hours, I'm alive, and well.
However, today is Sunday, so let's return to the subject matter of the day. Robyn Blumner credits the modern-day Four Horsemen to have changed America. By consensus, they are Britishers Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and Americans Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. Here is a two-hour video featuring the four.
Some highlights of Blumner's contention:
- “From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the world’s more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little,” wrote author Ronald Inglehart* in his article “Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religion” in the September/October 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. “Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data.”
- Up until 2007, Inglehart said, the United States had been an outlier country, a stark exception to the tendency that when a country’s economy modernized, its citizenry concomitantly secularized. But the new trend is unmistakable. According to the World Values Survey, in ten years, from 2007 to 2017, the United States went from one of the world’s most religious countries to the eleventh least religious country, a startling drop-off in a blink of an eye
- This wave of irreligion is catching the entire world right now. From 2007 to 2019, fully forty-three of the forty-nine countries Inglehart studied have become less religious.
- Inglehart drills down further. He claims that the biggest factor pushing populations away from religion is that the strict gender roles and sexual mores defended by the major faiths no longer comport with modern values. Having large families was once a practical imperative for social security and to provide needed labor, and religions built their architecture of moral behavior and social order atop that framework.
- In today’s modern economies, that calculation is inverted. Now it makes more financial sense to have fewer children (and use verboten birth control to ensure that outcome). Families where women are seen as equal economic partners, deploying their human capital in the marketplace, are also demonstrably better off. Religion is not just irrelevant to that life trajectory but is positively hostile to it, resulting in people voting with their feet.
- About the U.S....Why then the change? What was so special about 2007 and onward?
- Well, I (meaning Blumner) would posit: books.
At about that time, contemporary atheist authors hit their stride. Sam Harris’s groundbreaking The End of Faith came out in mid-2004, but it was a targeted critique of Islam following the attacks of 9/11. Christians didn’t think his tightly argued thesis about the danger of religious belief applied to them. It wasn’t until 2006 that Har
ris wiped the smug grin off Christianity’s face with his Letter to a Christian Nation.- That year, too, Richard Dawkins’ brilliant challenge to god beliefs, The God Delusion, was published and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for fifty-one weeks. It has gone on to sell more than 3.8 million copies. I actually had an influential discussion with him on the University of Hawaii Manoa Campus.
- That year was also when Daniel Dennett’s insightful Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon came out.
- And 2007 not only brought Christopher Hitchens’s scorching polemic against religion, God Is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything...
- ...but readers of English were treated to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s jaw-droppingly honest memoir Infidel.
- These books, and the nascent and growing internet audience for the authors’ lectures and debates, provided a foundation of intellectual reasoning for millions of people harboring religious doubts.
- And almost everyone has religious doubts: even, famously, Mother Teresa, who said in private correspondence to her Catholic confidant that Jesus responded to her prayers with “silence.”
- These books said, you don’t have to believe nonsense just because everyone around you has succumbed. Others have broken free by simply thinking it through. These books provided clearly stated arguments demonstrating how all religions are just cultural mythologies.
There are other factors that social scientists point to, such as the pedophilia scandal of the Catholic Church, the rise of evangelical politics aligning with the Republican Party, and the establishment of LGBTQ-rights activism, which made untenable conservative religious teachings on homosexuality.- In 2007... Inglehart wrote, “Americans’ mean rating of the importance of God in their lives was 8.2 on a ten-point scale. In the most recent U.S. survey, from 2017, the figure had dropped to 4.6, an astonishing sharp decline.”
- As it’s said, “success has many fathers,” and so it is with getting our fellow Americans to see the light of reason. We can credit our existential security; our educational, scientific, and technological advancement; the shift in family size and the role of women in society; and the repellant effect of religion as handmaid to reactionary politics.
But to my (Blumner) mind, not enough attention has been paid to the impact made by the writers of new atheism: Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hirsi Ali, and Hitchens.- Their writings opened people’s minds to the possibility that religious doubts were not something to overcome or ignore but something to investigate and explore. That simple change of perspective changed America, setting the country on a course to rapidly secularize. I don’t believe the timing of their writings and this phenomenon is merely coincident. I believe it is causal, and it is time to give credit where it’s due.
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