Abstract
The world’s most famous religions Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism are represented in various regions and continents and dominate to varying degrees. In addition, we have worldviews like atheism, superstition, or different forms of belief within the so-called indigenous peoples. The empirical analysis of the relationship between the major worldviews draw no significant correlation between the share of a respective religious group in a country and the different access rates to ICT. The religious diversity in a country has a positive impact on the level of ICT uses rates which is made plausible by the level of wealth. So, convergence in the use of ICT among the major religious has advanced quite for even if absolute convergence is not reached yet.
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Notes
- 1.
Indigenous peoples are not the subject of investigations in this work, since they have no or only a very low level in technological development and there is very limited data available for a global analysis.
- 2.
Quotations:“God does not play dice.” and “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.” Friedrich Dürrenmatt once said in a lecture on Einstein’s 100th birthday: “Einstein used so often to speak of God, that I almost suspect he was a theologian in disguise.” [435].
- 3.
Therefore, only the year 2010 is examined, because despite extensive research, a worldwide homogenous data basis to the proportion of the religious affiliation could be found only for this year.
- 4.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all refer to the prophet Abraham as the father of their faith [244].
- 5.
The Bible is a collection of scriptures, with the basic distinction in Old and New Testament. It is not just a book, but a multitude of books as a unit. This is true for both the Old and the New Testament.
- 6.
The Qur’an is the sacred book of Islam which, over the course of 22 years, has been handed over the revelations of God (“Allah”) to the Prophet Muhammad by angel Gabriel.
- 7.
One reason for this definition lies in the data base that does not provide exact values for countries in which less than 1% of the population belongs to one or the other religion. With this 1% limit, the quality criterion accuracy and granularity is taken into account.
- 8.
According to Pearson, the correlation coefficient is a dimensionless measure of the strength of the linear relationship between two quantitative variables and is also referred to as the product–moment–correlation coefficient or the measure correlation coefficient.
- 9.
The difficulty lies in a precise definition of when a country is rather Christian or rather Islamic. Due to the fact that these two worldviews are found, even if only slightly, in many countries, a 40% limit was chosen here. This means that countries whose population consists of at least 40% Christian or Islamic people are considered.
- 10.
It should be noted that the fixed landline telephony in the oil states is largely replaced by the mobile telephone, but in sum the number of connections to the fixed network and the mobile telephone are constantly growing. This situation and relationship to the use of technology has already been discussed several times in Chap. 4.
- 11.
The reasons for this are primarily the role of women in the economically strong countries, such as, the longer education path and the embedding in the formalized work processes. In addition, in the poorer countries, many children are a kind of social or pension insurance.
- 12.
As with the definition of rather Christian and Islamic countries above, there is also a difficulty in defining exactly when a country should be described as rather Buddhist or rather Hindu. Due to the fact that these two worldviews are found with a noticeable share (only) in a few countries, a 10% limit was chosen. That means, all countries whose population is comprised of at least 10% Buddhists or Hindus are considered. As reminder: Among Christians and Muslims, we had set this limit to 40%. An equal value for the Buddhists and Hindus would include too few countries.
- 13.
As reminder: this effect is primarily due to the fact that the MPR is far above the 100% limit in many countries.
- 14.
In 2014, the IPR is about 46% in China.
- 15.
As reminder: Despite having the largest number of Internet users, China is still underproportionally represented when regarding this number in the context of the large population size (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.1.3).
- 16.
In 2014 India has an IPR of about 20%.
- 17.
Note: The reasons for the lower economic performance and economic growth of India compared to China are historically also due to the fact that India has long been under the colonial rule of the British Empire. Politically, the reasons could also be that India has a democratic form of government and has longer and more time-oriented decision-making structures compared to China. With regard to religion, the Indian people are more religious than the Chinese. As described at the beginning of this chapter, this can lead people toward their future aspirations (after death), which can ultimately lead to the fact that the economic and technical dynamics are less pronounced.
- 18.
The special position of the gulf states Qatar and Bahrain was discussed in Sect. 5.1.5 in the context of the rather Islamic countries.
- 19.
Due to this high concentration, one can look on the data without Israel. Basically, it does not make big of a difference, if the share of Jews of a population of a country and the FTR is regarded with or without Israel. In both cases, there is, with a correlation coefficient close to zero, almost no correlation.
- 20.
The difficulty lies in the definition of when a country is considered rather Jewish. Compared to Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, there is no country beside Israel, which can be considered Jewish in a narrow sense. The Jewish population lives (almost) all over the world in an extremely small minority. Only in Israel (75.6%), the United States (1.8%) and Canada (about 1%) they make up more than 1% of the total population. For that reason, countries are only considered if they have a Jewish population of at least 0.1%. A 10%-limit was defined for the group of countries with other religions.
- 21.
Regarding this correlation without Israel implies a moderate negative correlation between the share of Jewish population and the MPR.
- 22.
The reason for excluding the State of Israel from the analysis is due to the statistic reasons that have been explained above.
- 23.
Remember: Israel is also the only country in the world where a majority of citizens are Jewish.
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Ünver, H. (2018). Global Networking and Worldview. In: Global Networking, Communication and Culture: Conflict or Convergence?. Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, vol 151. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76448-1_5
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