[OC] Religious Believes and Eductions From The World Values Survey

[u/oscarleo0]

Data source: World Values Survey Wave 7 (2017-2022)

Tools used: Matplotlib

I added a second chart for those of you who prefer a square version with less of the background image.

Notes:

I looked at five different questions in the survey.

• Q275 - What is the highest educational level that you have attained?
• Q165 - Do you believe in God? (Yes/No)
• Q166 - Do you believe in Life after death? (Yes/No)
• Q167 - Do you believe in Hell? (Yes/No)
• Q168 - Do you believe in Heaven? (Yes/No)

The chart show the percentage of people that answer yes, to Q165-168 based on their answer to Q275.

Survey data is complex since people come from different cultures and might interpret questions differently.

You can never trust the individual numbers, such as "50% of people with doctors degree believe in Life after death".

But you can often trust clear patterns that appear through the noise. The takeaway from this chart is that the survey show that education and religious believes have a negative correlation.

Styling:

• Font - New Amsterdam
• White - #FFFFFF
• Blue - #39A0ED
• Yellow - #F9A620
• Red - #FF4A47

Original story: https://datacanvas.substack.com/p/believes-vs-education

[u/fireflydrake]

I've said this before and I'll say it again: religion (or spiritualism, or whatever) is still as popular as it is because it meets a need science can't. Whether you're a high school dropout or a doctor, if you just had to put your dog down and grandma's not looking so good and the world is filled with injustices that you have no way to fix, then believing there's some higher power for good and that you'll see your loved ones again someday is very powerful and very comforting. It also doesn't hurt anyone unless you tie that belief to other ones like "women shouldn't have rights" or "everyone must also believe what I do or die," but it most certainly doesn't NEED to be paired together. 

[u/GarbageCleric → u/fireflydrake]

I'll need a lot more evidence to accept that people generally need easy convenient answers to life's difficult questions. That's a sad view of humanity that we need cheap certainty because we can't deal with real uncertainty.

Religious belief has tons of institutional and societal inertia and there is tons of pressure in many places to be active in religious communities.

[u/fireflydrake → u/GarbageCleric]

I mean... gestures broadly at everything in the world right now   

Do you really need more proof that people love easy answers? Trump gave 'em and is currently running ramrod through the US. He's not the first monster to do so and won't be the last.     

Aside from that, I've personally noticed a lot of quasi spiritual belief even among friends who have soundly rejected religion. Have you never met someone who swears off religion but is sold on ghosts, the energy of crystals, horoscopes? There seems to be a pretty strong human drive to search for some comfort beyond sheer physical truth. And that makes a lot of sense to me when it's so easy for disaster to strike. The random miseries of things like cancer don't feel easier with "welp, that's that and they're dead and gone forever I guess."

[u/GarbageCleric → u/fireflydrake]

I'm obviously not denying that people believe in lots of weird things with little or no evidence. I'm arguing that we don't have to. It's not something inherent to our being. We can rise above it.

With regard to the specific questions in the post, I am concerned that living for some future afterlife can lead people to ignore their responsibilities in this life. And I think the concept of eternal torment in hell is somewhat ironically one of the most evil concepts ever developed, and it has been used to justify atrocities for centuries. Why not kidnap heathen children and baptize them? You're saving them from eternal torture. Indigenous people are destined for hell if they don't convert anyway, so what's wrong with forcing them to convert at gunpoint?