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Religiosity can never accurately be measured - Coggle Diagram
Religiosity can never accurately be measured
Inductive arguments
When you have evidence that points to the probability of a subjective conclusion - opposite of a deductive argument, with 100% proof
Because of all of these problems, we cannot create deductive arguments about religiosity
E.g. is Pakistan and Germany more religious? - church/mosque attendance, political influence, membership of extremist organisations, specifically atheistic organisations, social influence of religion
Definition of religiosity
The intensity of religion in a society or person - Clements and Cornwall divide religiosity into the three categories
Believe - belief in religious things - orthodox or non-orthodox (Cornwall); the line between religious and non-religious is 'do you believe in a higher being' (Hughes and Church)
Behave - religious practice - public or private (Cornwall)
Belong - identity, as a % how important is religion in each aspect of your life (Abrams et al.)
Problems with data collection
In some countries, it is hard to measure for political reasons - e.g. France doesn't measure religious categories in the census
Surveys and polls are not always reliable because people do not always answer truthfully - Navone (religion is seen as good, so people say they are more religious than they are)
Some people lie in censuses because of the consequences of where they are - e.g. in Pakistan, atheists and Christians are often killed or persecuted, so they lie
Belonging without believing - kids being taken to church by their parents or people who are not religious but must say that they are
There are 3 factors to measure - some sociologists divide it further into 9 or even more - too long and too expensive and too complicated to realistically do
Believing without belonging - they don't go to church so are very hard to find and ask
Problems with data comparison
We have no real evidence of religiosity for history (sociology only became a real thing in the last 100 years) - e.g. no one can agree how religious the Roman Empire was
Some countries don't have reliable data - e.g. North Korea or Islamic State
Religions are different - a monk in Christianity is different to a monk in Buddhism, so it is hard to compare them meaningfully; the concept of God changes a lot between religions
Religions are massive and have large differences inside them - e.g. Gay marriage and the Church of England - in Uganda, it is illegal and the church is against it; in the UK, the church is in favour
Problems with data interpretation
Takes a lot of resources to make any big judgements (e.g. a country)
Problems with the definition of religion - for everyone it is different - Tanaka studied Japanese religion and found that many Japanese people were doing ancestor worship/praying at shrines, but they did not call it religious
Believing without belonging - religion is now much more private and individual - so everyone has their own beliefs and own views on religion - belief is now a spectrum
Ways to measure
Church census, surveys, census, proxy measures (e.g. how many people buy the bible, search for online terms), membership of organisations