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as people’s lives become more secure in material terms, they have less need for the consolations of religion.
Keith Payne • The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Changes the Way We Think, Live and Die
The New Testament, created during the time of the Roman Empire, bears some traces of modernity as a result. You couldn’t invent a story about God completely obliterating the city of Rome (a la Sodom and Gomorrah), because the Roman historians would call you on it, and you couldn’t just stone them.
Eliezer Yudkowsky • Rationality
Religion is a powerful synchronizer of minds. Any protocol has network effects, cultural ones no less than others — agreement on behavioral and moral conventions allows for more efficient cooperation between human beings. Religion helps us to help each other flourish. That is not a coincidence.
Sonya Mann • What is God?
Rodney Stark, in his authoritative study The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History,18 discusses the rise of Christianity in its early
Vishal Mangalwadi • The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization
The margins of power may not be attractive or comfortable, but we take heart in the fact that God used Christians mightily in the early church in that context, and he is still doing that today in the global East and South. We can be the city on the hill without being on Capitol Hill.
Collin Hansen • The Great Dechurching
But as Peter Turchin has argued, in his book End Times, the unintended result of the country’s focus on higher education, as opposed to birth or caste, as the new means of constructing an overclass was an “overproduction” of elites that created too many qualified candidates for too few jobs.
Nicholas W. Zamiska • The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West
Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“has been empirically shown to be false.”63 Countries such as China are becoming more religious (and Christian) even as they modernize.
Timothy Keller • Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World
The masses of the people are poor. If we dare take the position that in Jesus there was at work some radical destiny, it would be safe to say that in his poverty he was more truly Son of man than he would have been if the incident of family or birth had made him a rich son of Israel. It is not a…
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