Phil Zuckerman has released a chapter in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Atheism that lists the least religious countries in the world, and concludes that “high levels of organic atheism are strongly correlated with high levels of societal health, such as low homicide rates, low poverty rates, low infant mortality rates, and low illiteracy rates, as well as high levels of educational attainment, per capita income, and gender equality”.
The top 10 are:
1. Sweden (up to 85% non-believer, atheist, agnostic)
2. Vietnam
3. Denmark
4. Norway
5. Japan
6. Czech Republic
7. Finland
8. France
9. South Korea
10. Estonia (up to 49% non-believer, atheist, agnostic)
On South Africa, he has this to say: “According to a 1999 Gallup International Poll, nearly 11% of South Africans chose ‘none’ as their religion. According to Inglehart et al (2004), 1% of South Africans do not believe in God.” Let’s hope that figure’s wrong.
Obviously, like all statistics, this is all open to reinterpretation, and will, no doubt, be debunked as total crap by some religious fundamentalist or another academic who decides that atheism-bashing is even cooler than atheism.
More info here on Gadling, and this is the original paper.
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