As religion declines, Norway turns to ghosts to fill the void
In Norway, the native population is quickly losing its religion, turning to agnosticism and atheism. While this would seem a triumph for rationalism, at the same time the Norwegians are losing their faith in the Christian God, they’re glomming onto a belief in ghosts. Anecdotes include the popularity of the Norwegian TV show “The Power of Spirits,” now in its tenth season and watched by approximately ten percent of the country.
It seems that humans may well just be built to assume the supernatural. If not a god of some kind, then some other spooooky critter. My guess is that this is an evolutionary holdover. The *vast* majority of humanity’s time on Earth was spent in pre-history, living in “stone age” conditions. During that time, life was a constant struggle for survival, where ever rustle in a bush was potentially a predator going to jump out and eat you. So mankind must have evolved certain responses such as a mix of curiosity and fear. These would, it seems to me, potentially lead to the development of the belief in the supernatural as a way to explain an incredibly complex world in a way a smart-yet-primitive human could accept. Some Weird Event occurs; blaming it on the spirit of an ancestor really doesn’t explain it, just pushes the explanation one step down. But that one step is something that people can accept as a sufficient explanation: “Dead uncle Ogg did it.”
Make that way of thinking sufficiently useful as a way of letting people accept the world… it won’t take too many thousand generations before it’s ingrained into the gene code. And so you can take a modern enlightened and educated westerner and show him that his religion is bunk, he might accept that… and simply transfer his religious feelings to something equally scientifically invalid.
Interestingly (to me) a lot of the religion-replacing spiritualism being discussed sounds a *lot* like the sort of spiritualism that arose in the Victorian era and reached its peak in the years just after WWI. Not really sure what to make of that.