Are there any cultures without religion

These two groups may describe themselves as agnostics, cultural Catholics, humanists, non-religious and other terms. Surveys and studies are used to show the most and least religious countries based on religious beliefs, the number of residents that "feel" religious, and how nations perceive other nations. When it comes to public perception, the results are a bit different. A survey of over 16, people found that nations viewed Australia as the least religious country globally.

According to one recent view, for example, belief in a "big God" — an all-powerful, punitive deity who sits in moral judgement on our actions — has been instrumental in bringing about social and political complexity in human cultures. But a new analysis of religious systems in Austronesia — the network of small and island states stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island — challenges that theory.

In these states, a more general belief in supernatural punishment did tend to precede political complexity, the research finds, but belief in supreme deities emerged after complex cultures have already formed 1.

Joseph Watts, a specialist in cultural evolution at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who worked on the study, wanted evidence to examine the idea that "big Gods" drive and sustain the evolution of big societies. Psychologist Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, has suggested that belief in moralizing high gods MHGs enabled societies to outgrow their limited ability to police moral conduct, by threatening freeloaders with retribution even if no-one else noticed their transgressions 2 , 3.

The most common examples of religions with MHGs — Christianity and Islam, the dominant representatives of so-called Abrahamic religions — are relatively recent and obviously postdated the appearance of complex societies. But the question is whether earlier MHGs, for example in Bronze Age civilisations, catalysed sociopolitical complexity or resulted from it. Rather than searching for statistical associations between social complexity and religious beliefs, researchers need ways to untangle cause and effect, Watts says.

Watts and his colleagues pruned the or so known Austronesian cultures down to 96 with detailed ethnographic records, excluding any in which contact with Abrahamic religions might have had a distorting outside influence. They range from native Hawaiians, who hold polytheistic beliefs, to the Merina people in Madagascar, who believe in a supreme God.

The team considered two classes of religion: MHGs and a broader belief in systems of supernatural punishment or 'BSP' for social transgressions, such as those enacted through ancestral spirits or inanimate forces such as karma. Although both schemes see religious or supernatural agents as imposing codes of moral conduct, BSP does not assume a single supreme deity who oversees that process. They used trees of evolutionary connections between cultures, deduced from earlier studies of linguistic relationships, to explore how the societies were inter-related and exchanged ideas.

That in turn allowed them to test different hypotheses about MHGs and BSPs — for example, whether belief in MHGs precedes and presumably then stabilizes the emergence of political complexity. For BSPs, however, the beliefs seem to help political complexity to emerge, although by no means guarantee it. He says that societies became more politically complex as networks of trade and reputation emerged, and that the key to this process was language, not religion. So what are MHGs for?

Anthropologist Hervey Peoples at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that there is good evidence that, even if MHGs do not drive political and social complexity, they can affect and stabilize it. Norenzayan agrees. So it's not all that surprising that big moralizing gods don't play a central role. The gods play no role in spiritual liberation and enlightenment; humans must find their own path to enlightenment with the help of wise human teachers.

Around the same time when Buddhism and Jainism arose in the sixth century B. Although none of their original texts have survived, Buddhist and Hindu authors describe the Carvakas as firm atheists who believed that nothing existed beyond the material world.

To the Carvakas, there was no life after death, no soul apart from the body, no gods and no world other than this one. The Ajivikas claimed that the fate of the soul was determined by fate alone, and not by a god, or even by free will.

The Ajivikas taught that everything was made up of atoms, but that these atoms were moving and combining with each other in predestined ways. Like the Carvaka school, the Ajivika school is today only known from texts composed by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. It is therefore difficult to determine exactly what the Ajivikas themselves thought.

According to Buddhist texts , the Ajivikas argued that there was no distinction between good and evil and there was no such thing as sin. The school may have existed around the same time as early Buddhism, in the fifth century B.

While the Hindu tradition of India embraces the belief in many gods and goddesses — million of them, according to some sources — there are also atheistic strands of thought found within Hinduism.