A study using census data from New Zealand and eight other countries suggests religion is set for extinction in all these nations, researchers say. The data reflected a steady rise in the proportion of the population claiming no religious affiliation. Academics from Northwestern University, in Illinois, Arizona University and a research company in Tuscon used a mathematical model to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one. The American research used "nonlinear dynamics" put a numerical basis behind the decline of religion as seen in census data from New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. "The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries," the BBC reported today. In New Zealand, 2006 census figures show that the number and proportion of people indicating that they had no religion continued to increase, with 1,297,104 people (34.7 per cent) stated that they had no religion, compared with 1,028,052 people (29.6 per cent) in the 2001 census.
NZPA