Interrelation of Belief in Dangerous World with Religiosity, Atheism and Religious Indifferentism of Personality (in Russian)

Abstract

The article views differences of dangerous world beliefs in religious, indifferent to religion people and atheists, as well as statistical interconnection between dangerous world beliefs, autonomous and controlled religiosity in the context of self-determination theory. According to some preceding research, objective threat to survival and well-being is connected to higher popularity of religious beliefs and practices, while the growth of secularism and atheism of the recent times may be explained by objective improvement of the quality of life and, consequently, by subjective feeling of existential safety. It is supposed that religious way of dealing with uncertainty and anxiety about the outside world is to a greater or lesser degree effective. Thus, the hypothesis is that in identical circumstances religious subjects in comparison to representatives of other groups might estimate outside world as less dangerous and atheists – as the most dangerous. One of the basic conditions of self-determination theory is that autonomous motivation of activity, including religious one, has positive psychological consequences, and controlled motivation has negative consequences. This condition allows making a hypothesis according to which in religious group autonomous religiosity will correlate to dangerous world belief positively and controlled religiosity will correlate with it negatively. In the first case the counterhypothesis was confirmed: atheists estimate world as the most safe place and religious subjects as the most dangerous place, indifferent to religion subjects demonstrate medium results. In the second case we were unable to find significant correlation between type of religiosity and dangerous world belief.