“Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says.” Thus the headline on the Beeb News website. And those nine nations would be which? Lemme see if I can guess: Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, Thailand, Israel, . . . Am I getting warm?
The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.
Oh. So religion may become extinct in nine comfortable cool-temperate-zone social democracies populated mainly by mean-IQ-100 white Europeans of Christian heritage, seven of which nations speak languages of the Germanic family and the other two of which are in the broad German-Austrian-Lutheran cultural sphere.
Back to sleep.
[Incidentally, why doesn’t the Czech Republic get itself a proper name? Why not “Czechia”? Though I suppose in the fulness of time “Czechistan” may come to fit. The TFR is 1.26 children per woman. “The Czech Republic has one of the least religious populations on Earth,” says Wikipedia.]
What a precipitous drop for Ireland, a country that used to be amongst the most religious in Europe. I imagine if it hadn’t been for Irish nationalism, they might well have turned out to be amongst the most Protestant a few centuries ago, sort of like the Scots.
The Czech name for their country (as opposed to their government) is “the Czech lands”. These include both Bohemia and Moravia, neither of which is to be slighted. A noun denoting the whole could doubtless be invented, as the name “Belgium” was for “the formerly Austrian provinces desiring independence from the Kingdom of the Netherlands”. While we’re at it, let’s make up a noun that correctly denotes the United States of America.
Dunno. Czechia always seemed fine by me as an English name for the country. To be honest though, I’ll just be happy when people stop referring to the Czech Republic as Czechoslovakia as if we were living in 1988.
Not to be nitpicky, but the tfr for the Czech Republic in 2010 was 1.49.
http://www.czso.cz/csu/csu.nsf/enginformace/aoby031411.doc
“Religion” I love it.
Depending on the context, “Religion” either means, “Christianity,” or, “Islam.”
“Religion going extinct in some places”
VS
“Religious motivation behind bombing of orphanage”
I quit getting mad at this sort of thing when I realized that – with a modicum of effort – one can tease out the truth the journalists are trying to obscure.
It’s like reading in a mirror. Tricky at first, but you get the hang of it.
If journalists started reporting events with objectivity and candor, I’d be thrown for a loop for a while.
Karl, “Godscountry” seems to serve OK. (For the US of A.)
I dunno, Derb–the Dominican Republic has done just fine with the same formulation for a long time. And you have to admit their ballplayers beat the Czechs all to hell. Who was last Czech who could hit a major league fastball?
Czech No Slovakia.
And they can call their exiles and expatriates “bounced Czechs.”
It will reach a point where fecund newcomers will bump the birth rates back up. And Mohammed will be the top child’s name.
Then there is the joke about the Czech and the Pole who go camping and get killed and eaten by two bears, one male and one female. The coroner is having trouble determining which body is which until a freelance worker states “the female bear ate the Pole.” He seems so sure so the coroner says “how do you know?”. He says “it’s obvious; the Czech is always in the male”.