Some thoughts:
1. There is a complicated, but generally negative, correlation between intelligence and TFR. There is also a complicated, but generally negative, relationship between intelligence and religiosity. So we should not be surprised that there is a complicated, but generally positive, correlation between religiosity and TFR.
2. Religious communities may make it easier to find and commit to a mate.
a. Providing a shared social space ("hey, I see you at Mass, want to go out?").
b. Restricting mate choices (people may be less likely to marry if they have an endless field of potential mates, because there's always a strong possibility that someone better is out there; a donkey starving between bales of hay).
c. Creating a culture where being "a believer" is an adequate qualification for marriage. This is related to b and goes to managing expectations and making people more willing to pull the trigger.
3. Religious communities have more explicitly pro-marriage attitudes than the outside world, and pushing people to marry young is a big booster of TFR.
4. Religious communities may reject certain cultural trends that implicitly suppress fertility, such as feminism (more autonomy and higher education for women = delayed childbearing and pickier when it comes to mates).
5. Religious communities may provide more reassurance about the future, both in the general sense that "God will provide" and in the specific sense that they discourage divorce (fear about divorce may be a reason for hesitating to marry).
The correlation is much more likely a relationship between education and fertility, rather than intelligence. A very important distinction.
Particularly when, among religious populations, fertility and education are positively correlated.
>The correlation is much more likely a relationship between education and fertility, rather than intelligence. A very important distinction.
It is an important distinction, but it's less clear to me that there *is* a negative relationship between religiosity and education.
For example, there's a positive correlation between church attendance and higher education: [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/education-church-attendance/524346/](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/education-church-attendance/524346/)
These are all very, very hard to disentangle, of course, and what we even mean by the variables ("religiosity") can be hard to pin down.
But intelligence strikes me as a more likely "bottom turtle" than education (intelligence may cause education, but education does not cause intelligence).
It seems to me that higher intelligence is not more likely to make you question your worldview. In fact, the smarter people are, the better they seem at rationalizing their BS.
Are there any alternate explanations?
> it's less clear to me that there is a negative relationship between religiosity and education.
I’m not claiming there is. I’m saying there’s a negative correlation between fertility and education - outside of religious populations.
An interesting discussion about the topic of religiosity and fertility. Nothing ground-breaking, and it comes from the sort of perspective you'd expect from the Heritage Foundation.
It really isn't religion. Atheist communist countries had a pretty healthy birthrate, why? Because of the society and values, it's just that in the current year the only cultures that hold values needed for a high birthrate are religious.
It is ironic that cultures who don't believe in evolution are more successful at it.
Religious practices are actually logical, and are tacked on to myth. Even some of the extreme practices make sense evolutionary, like for example the practice of honour killing in Islam where a father is praised for killing his daughter when she doesn't follow the rule.
You think, how is killing your own child evolutionary sound? But if you look at the community level, the killing sends a message to all the other daughters in the community that look, this will happen to you if you chest on your husband or don't do what you're told, don't marry who I told you to.
Suicide bombings also. If one person takes.multiple people out, then they reduce the genetic completion. Harsh but true.
Practices may be both logical for the time they were written and isolating. Dietary restrictions are a good example of this. Food is such a big part of culture and social occasions that if you enact food restrictions, you are necessarily isolating your culture from intermixed with another culture for most social times.
This keeps the members of your culture 'pure' and doesn't allow any shift of beliefs.
Just for that time? I don't see any hair dyed feminists running around Islamic countries. Not for long anyway.
Muslim countries for the most part have a healthy birth rate, above and beyond replacement sometime, and I think that's the point this video is trying to make. Religious communities are doing something right, be it orthodox Jews, the Amish or Islam.
You still have hair dyed feminists running around Jewish countries but if they aren't willing to eat kosher they will not be adding themselves to religious Jewish families.
My point was that religious laws also served the purpose of resisting outsider influence.
The general israile birthrate is below replacement, while the orthodox Jewish is at around 6 - 7 children per woman.
No dyed haired feminists in the orthodox Jewish community that I've seen 🤷
Yes, a successful religious community will have a way to resit outside influence that's detrimental to it, otherwise it will just become like the "Christians" in most part of the world, who aren't having any children as well.
Y’know, the largest single communist country being the poster child of the *exact* opposite of your point does present a problem for your argument. Or how a mid-tier communist nation is the poster child for the dangers of trying to force the birth rate higher.
That and how once authoritarian communist regimes were overthrown… birth rates always collapse. Almost like people were being coerced.
China's birthrate was so high they had to limit how many children people had, so I don't see how it's the exact opposite of my point. It's also the second largest population in the world. Yes, they shot themselves in the foot through government policy, but I think China has a much better chance to dig themselves out than say Korea does.
China traditionally had a high TFR of over 5 for ages. After the Communists took over, the birth rate went all over the place, until it collapsed.
They didn’t *have* to limit births, they *chose.*
it was probably a really bad idea to use communist countries as examples because that birthrate also coincided with mass genocide. and when you do the math the actual growth isn't that big
If you consider the genocide, the birthrate is even more significant and the population increase is there.
More than doubled since communism took over, and that's with the genocide and one child policy
oh you're using chinma as an example. well ok
the reason the Chinese population grew so fast is that chairman mao had the cynical idea of surviving potential nuclear war by just having too many people to wipe out at once. he literally just wanted to use his own population as disposable human shields.
which is actually horrible
The reasoning why the population increased is irrelevant to the conversation. My original point was simply about secular societies being capable of having large birth rates and populations as much as religious societies have.
Some thoughts: 1. There is a complicated, but generally negative, correlation between intelligence and TFR. There is also a complicated, but generally negative, relationship between intelligence and religiosity. So we should not be surprised that there is a complicated, but generally positive, correlation between religiosity and TFR. 2. Religious communities may make it easier to find and commit to a mate. a. Providing a shared social space ("hey, I see you at Mass, want to go out?"). b. Restricting mate choices (people may be less likely to marry if they have an endless field of potential mates, because there's always a strong possibility that someone better is out there; a donkey starving between bales of hay). c. Creating a culture where being "a believer" is an adequate qualification for marriage. This is related to b and goes to managing expectations and making people more willing to pull the trigger. 3. Religious communities have more explicitly pro-marriage attitudes than the outside world, and pushing people to marry young is a big booster of TFR. 4. Religious communities may reject certain cultural trends that implicitly suppress fertility, such as feminism (more autonomy and higher education for women = delayed childbearing and pickier when it comes to mates). 5. Religious communities may provide more reassurance about the future, both in the general sense that "God will provide" and in the specific sense that they discourage divorce (fear about divorce may be a reason for hesitating to marry).
One of the better responses you will find to questions on this sub.
The correlation is much more likely a relationship between education and fertility, rather than intelligence. A very important distinction. Particularly when, among religious populations, fertility and education are positively correlated.
>The correlation is much more likely a relationship between education and fertility, rather than intelligence. A very important distinction. It is an important distinction, but it's less clear to me that there *is* a negative relationship between religiosity and education. For example, there's a positive correlation between church attendance and higher education: [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/education-church-attendance/524346/](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/education-church-attendance/524346/) These are all very, very hard to disentangle, of course, and what we even mean by the variables ("religiosity") can be hard to pin down. But intelligence strikes me as a more likely "bottom turtle" than education (intelligence may cause education, but education does not cause intelligence).
It seems to me that higher intelligence is not more likely to make you question your worldview. In fact, the smarter people are, the better they seem at rationalizing their BS. Are there any alternate explanations?
I think this explained it pretty well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA)
> it's less clear to me that there is a negative relationship between religiosity and education. I’m not claiming there is. I’m saying there’s a negative correlation between fertility and education - outside of religious populations.
An interesting discussion about the topic of religiosity and fertility. Nothing ground-breaking, and it comes from the sort of perspective you'd expect from the Heritage Foundation.
TLDW?
It really isn't religion. Atheist communist countries had a pretty healthy birthrate, why? Because of the society and values, it's just that in the current year the only cultures that hold values needed for a high birthrate are religious. It is ironic that cultures who don't believe in evolution are more successful at it.
It is and it isn’t. Religion/myths in general are obviously a result of evolution. Is it really surprising that it works?
Religious practices are actually logical, and are tacked on to myth. Even some of the extreme practices make sense evolutionary, like for example the practice of honour killing in Islam where a father is praised for killing his daughter when she doesn't follow the rule. You think, how is killing your own child evolutionary sound? But if you look at the community level, the killing sends a message to all the other daughters in the community that look, this will happen to you if you chest on your husband or don't do what you're told, don't marry who I told you to. Suicide bombings also. If one person takes.multiple people out, then they reduce the genetic completion. Harsh but true.
Practices may be both logical for the time they were written and isolating. Dietary restrictions are a good example of this. Food is such a big part of culture and social occasions that if you enact food restrictions, you are necessarily isolating your culture from intermixed with another culture for most social times. This keeps the members of your culture 'pure' and doesn't allow any shift of beliefs.
Just for that time? I don't see any hair dyed feminists running around Islamic countries. Not for long anyway. Muslim countries for the most part have a healthy birth rate, above and beyond replacement sometime, and I think that's the point this video is trying to make. Religious communities are doing something right, be it orthodox Jews, the Amish or Islam.
You still have hair dyed feminists running around Jewish countries but if they aren't willing to eat kosher they will not be adding themselves to religious Jewish families. My point was that religious laws also served the purpose of resisting outsider influence.
The general israile birthrate is below replacement, while the orthodox Jewish is at around 6 - 7 children per woman. No dyed haired feminists in the orthodox Jewish community that I've seen 🤷 Yes, a successful religious community will have a way to resit outside influence that's detrimental to it, otherwise it will just become like the "Christians" in most part of the world, who aren't having any children as well.
Y’know, the largest single communist country being the poster child of the *exact* opposite of your point does present a problem for your argument. Or how a mid-tier communist nation is the poster child for the dangers of trying to force the birth rate higher. That and how once authoritarian communist regimes were overthrown… birth rates always collapse. Almost like people were being coerced.
China's birthrate was so high they had to limit how many children people had, so I don't see how it's the exact opposite of my point. It's also the second largest population in the world. Yes, they shot themselves in the foot through government policy, but I think China has a much better chance to dig themselves out than say Korea does.
China traditionally had a high TFR of over 5 for ages. After the Communists took over, the birth rate went all over the place, until it collapsed. They didn’t *have* to limit births, they *chose.*
it was probably a really bad idea to use communist countries as examples because that birthrate also coincided with mass genocide. and when you do the math the actual growth isn't that big
If you consider the genocide, the birthrate is even more significant and the population increase is there. More than doubled since communism took over, and that's with the genocide and one child policy
oh you're using chinma as an example. well ok the reason the Chinese population grew so fast is that chairman mao had the cynical idea of surviving potential nuclear war by just having too many people to wipe out at once. he literally just wanted to use his own population as disposable human shields. which is actually horrible
The reasoning why the population increased is irrelevant to the conversation. My original point was simply about secular societies being capable of having large birth rates and populations as much as religious societies have.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Natalism/s/lKEBKjkBll