Irreligion

Irreligion (adjective form: non-religious or irreligious) is the absence of religion, an indifference towards religion, a rejection of religion, or hostility towards religion. When characterized as the rejection of religious belief, it includes explicit atheism, religious dissidence, and secular humanism. When characterized as hostility towards religion, it includes anticlericalism, antireligion, and antitheism.

When characterized as indifference to religion, it includes apatheism. When characterized as the absence of religious belief, it may also include deism, implicit atheism, spiritual but not religious, agnosticism, pandeism, ignosticism, nontheism, pantheism, panentheism, religious skepticism, and freethought. Irreligion may include forms of theism, depending on the religious context it is defined against. In 18th-century Europe, the epitome of irreligion was deism.

A 2012 survey found that 36% of the world population is not religious and that between 2005 and 2012 world religiosity decreased by 9 percentage points. The Pew global report in 2010 noted that many that are not religious have some religious beliefs and the majority of nonreligious come from Asia and the Pacific. According to one source, it has been estimated that 40â€"50% of non-religious people hold belief in at least one deity, or in some higher power.

Constitutional protections

Most Western democracies protect the freedom of religion, and it is largely implied in respective legal systems that those who do not believe or observe any religion are allowed freedom of thought.

A noted exception to ambiguity, explicitly allowing non-religion, is Article 36 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of China (as authored in 1982), which states that "No state organ, public organization or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in, any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens who believe in, or do not believe in, any religion." Article 46 of China’s 1978 Constitution was even more explicit, stating that "Citizens enjoy freedom to believe in religion and freedom not to believe in religion and to propagate atheism."

Demographics

Although 10 countries listed below have non-religious majorities, it does not mean that majority of the populations of these countries don′t belong to any religious group. For example, 67.5% of the Swedish population belongs to Lutheran Christian Church, while 58.7% of Albanians declare themselves as Muslims. Also, though Scandinavian countries have among the highest measures of nonreligiosity and even atheism in Europe, 47% of atheists who live in those countries are still members of the national churches.

The tables below order the percentage of a country's population that are nonreligious from highest to lowest.

See also

• Humanism
• Importance of religion by country
• Irreligion by country
• Nontheistic religions
• Pantheism
• Post-theism
• Skepticism
• Spiritual but not religious
• Transtheistic

References

Further reading

• John Allen Paulos (9 June 2009). Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-8090-5918-8. 
• Richard Henry Popkin; Arie Johan Vanderjagt (1993). Scepticism and irreligion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-09596-0. 
• Eric Wright (November 2010). Irreligion: Thought, Rationale, History. BiblioBazaar. ISBN 978-1-171-06863-1.