I just finished reading Society without God, by American sociologist Phil Zuckerman. The book came out back in 2008, but I heard about it recently on a skeptic podcast and I felt I just had to buy it. Phil Zuckerman spent a year in Denmark in 2006, and also visited Sweden during that time to perform interviews with a wide sample of what seems to me to be typical Swedes and Danes, trying to understand their attitude towards god and religion. His conclusion is that the Nordic countries today are a special little area of deep secularism in a world that is mostly religious and apparently growing more religious recently. Even in fairly secularized Western Europe, the Nordic countries stand out (or at least Denmark and Sweden does, in his research). So what? For a Swede like myself this is pretty obvious… but when you combine this with the fact that the standard of living and overall feeling of security and quality of life in Denmark and Sweden is very high, Zuckerman finds a great argument against a certain argument brought forth by Christian conservatives in the US…
Continue reading “Off-topic: Society without God”
