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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   31688 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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They predicted that as the proportion of religious people waned, both sources of miracles would dry up. Naturally, nothing of the sort has happened (even when normalizing to total population)

True if big, but is it big? I am really interested to see comprehensible statistics of miracles per capita.

The historian Dr. Keener researched how common miracle claims are both currently and throughout history and published his results in two big ol' books. Unfortunately I don't own those two tomes so I don't have the hard data to throw at you, but based on reviews and interviews it seems that Keener has collected data on millions of miracle claims all over the world and finds that such claims are still pretty common.

For some statistics, according to Pew Research 29% of Americans claim that they had an experience of being in touch with the dead, 18% claim to have seen a ghost. In a more global study they found that among Christians (sadly they didn't study everyone, but given that 1/3rd of people are Christians it still covers a lot of ground) in the U.S. 29% claim to have witnessed divine healings, 39% say so in Brazil, 26% in Chile, 56% in Guatemala, 71% in Kenya, 62% in Nigeria, 38% in South Africa, 44% in India, 38% in the Philippines, and 10% in South Korea. That's a lot of miracle claims! It's certainly not uncommon.

EDIT: Also don't forget that the 2020 SSC Survey asked people if they ever had a spiritual experience or a religious experience. 21.6% said they had a spiritual experience, with 18.7% saying they might have had one, and 8.2% said they had a religious experience with 8.9% saying they might have. And this was a survey in which over 60% of the respondents were atheists, a very different sample from the general public (which, in the US, is about 4% atheist).

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