RELIGION BY THE NUMBERS PART ONE – FOLLOW THE MONEY
by Greg Forest
February 5, 2011
I am often asked why I don’t believe in God. I guess the short answer is that it just doesn’t make sense to me. When I declare my agnosticism, my atheist friends think that I’m cowardly by not making a direct statement about the non-existence of God. You can imagine what my religious friends think.
Robert Anton Wilson pretty much summed it up for me with his world view – that everything you think or believe should be probationary. If not, you become your own intellectual jailer, unable to think outside the box you create for yourself. To be completely honest, one must admit that you can’t know absolutely everything or be correct all the time. Sacred concepts can be overturned with the appearance of more compelling evidence. Or that is how it works for me. If more compelling evidence is put forward than current scientific evolutionary theory for example, I’m all ears. Make note of the operative words in the previous sentence – compelling and evidence. Very often, I find numbers to be compelling.
When pondering a deity, I must ask myself a few questions. Is the deity local or god of the entire universe and all of spacetime? If this is a timeless and universal god, what language would this being use to speak his will, to all nations, cultures and races? How is a message transmitted uniformly across all times, locations and cultures and can be verified for mistranslation or error? What lingo could be used to communicate with an alien culture halfway across the galaxy or a high school student in Texas? English?
I suppose that any alien culture within the event horizon of our century or so of radio and TV broadcasts might have a handle on English, and our transmission bubble grows at the speed of light – but the lion’s share of the universe wouldn’t even see or hear it.
There is a universal language that can be learned and utilized anywhere in spacetime, to the limits of current detection . It’s called mathematics.
Having come to this juncture, it’s on with the show – another reason for my quirky nature – religion by the numbers. If I believe math to be the “universal language” of intelligence, then applying this all-encompassing method to my belief system might reveal a few things. So I looked at an average religious life mathematically. Call it a cost benefit analysis of an imaginary religious self.
Here are my assumptions:
1. I am religious, but not overly devout. I go to church every Sunday, I tithe 10% to my church and go to most church functions.
2. It takes about three hours to complete a religious function. An hour to prepare for church and get into a pew, an hour in sermon attendance and a wind down period of one hour from rising out of your pew to lighting the backyard BBQ.
3. I am an average American in an economic sense and in terms of life expectancy.
4. For statistical purpose regarding my personal audit, I assume I am a male and will use masculine statistics.
Now I have to do the math. Luckily for my curious but numerically-challenged self, the math used in this scenario is simple; addition, subtraction, multiplying and dividing. Probably graduate school stuff these days, seems investment bankers can’t pull it off, but here we go.
Childhood – The Early Buy In
One goes to church every Sunday and attends other church events throughout the year. This begins by going to church as a child in Sunday school. So let’s say Sunday school starts at the age of five and continues until graduation into the main congregation at twelve years of age. So far, from the fifth birthday to the twelfth, one has spent 7 years, 55 times a year, 3 hours per episode in church. That is an aggregate of 1155 hours by year twelve or 48.13 (24-hour) days in the period of a religious youth. Set that figure aside and continue to adolescence.
Adolescence – Upping the Ante
A teen believer might find themselves taking on some of the responsibilities of an adult believer. Church attendance averages remain the same, as they will throughout a lifetime, but there is a small change in the devotion – one starts to make small donations to the church. They are small donations and only add up to about $10 dollars a visit but from year thirteen until the adherent’s graduation from college at age twenty-two, this will be the assumed baseline. In the years from the twelfth birthday to the twenty-second, one will have spent 10 years, 55 times a year, 3 hours per occurrence, in church for an aggregate time of 1650 hours or 68.75 (24-hour) days in church. At a personal financial cost of $5,500. Now let’s move on to the bulk of life – the working years.
Your Working Years – Making A Raise
From year twenty-two until year sixty-two, retirement age, you put in forty years of work. Church attendance numbers remain the same, but now we have an adult member of the congregation, tithing 10% of their net income to the church. A typical male my age working full time, will see an average income of $40, 416 over the span of his workforce career. The average income tax over this time is 25% – leaving a net income of $30,312 from which to tithe annually. In your productive years from twenty-two to sixty-two you will have attended church 2,200 times, requiring 6,600 hours or 275 (24-hour) days in church at a cost of $120,000 in tithing. Now on to the golden years.
Your Retirement Years – Going All In
From your sixty-second birthday until the day you meet your maker in your seventy-eighth year (current life expectancy), you will attend church yet another 880 times, 2640 hours or 110 (24-hour) days in church at a cost of $24,000. The cost has been reduced by half for this period as you are theoretically retired and now on a fixed income making you only able to tithe 5% during this period. Even though you will soon be off to the afterlife, you’re not quite finished. You will want to leave a donation for your church in your will. You have a $500,000 dollar estate from which you donate 10% or $50,000.
So in summary, in the lifetime of an average believer, they go to church 4015 times, requiring 12045 hours or 501 (24-hour) days or, more simply put, a full 1 year, 4 months of their lives in church. Using the figures above, the lifetime cost for belief in dollars is $199,500. Another way to view this time is that it is the equivalent of 301 (40-hour) work weeks. Or almost six years off with full pay.
Another way to look at the monetary side of this equation would be if, rather than donate to the church you (and your parents in early years) put that money aside in a retirement account or savings earning a meager 3% over your lifetime. Through the miracle of compound interest, you would reap an additional $242,914 dollars. So even if your out of pocket is only $200,000, the money you didn’t earn is conceivably another $242,00 for a total of $442,000 you have conceivably given over to the church. One can multiply this by the number of families in your congregation for a bit of the big picture from your church treasurer’s viewpoint. Compound interest works for the church too.
How a Religious Life Adds Up
So I ask myself, “Is there somewhere else I would rather spend over a year of my life and $442,000?” My answer is “many.” A number of scenarios come to mind, now facing my golden years, with what I could do with 16 months off and $442,000 to play with. At least many scenarios more exciting, fun or productive for me than church attendance. One other thing that glares out at me, after spending all this time and money in church, a believer would have learned essentially nothing new in over 73 years of church attendance. The song remains the same.
You may have noticed that I omitted a number of other cost variables – fuel to and from church, the new Easter outfit, etc. Depending on one’s car and vanity, these could also be factored in to pump the numbers upwards.
Of course I realize that many people give much more to their church and find it to be money well spent. To each his own – more power to you. This is merely how it worked out for me.
In my next installment I will look at other numbers, specifically statistics. Statistical math isn’t much harder than the basic math we shared in this example. The question we will look at next time is, “In the 2,000 year history of Christianity, how many believers thought that Jesus would return in their lifetime or soon thereafter? Mathematically speaking, what is the statistical likelihood of these predictions being accurate?”
-Kerrville, Texas February 5, 2011