In 100 years Religion will be looked upon the way we do Astrology, Alchemy and Voodoo, in other words, patently false, completely man made delusions. Agree or disagree?
We have a poll of scientists:
Scientists are supposed to be rational. So if half of them believe in a deity now, I would expect that at least that many of the general population would also 100 years from now.
believing in god and being religious are not the same thing
One fact that concerns some Christians and elates some atheists is that 93 percent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most elite scientific organizations in the United States, do not believe in God.
http://www.catholic.com/blog/trent-horn/does-it-matter-that-many-scientists-are-atheists
Here in Europe, hard core organized religion has certainly lost a lot of ground. At the same time, more and more people have vague, new-agey beliefs. I see that trend continuing and spreading to more parts of the world, but it looks like at least a big minority of the population will maintain belief in the supernatural in one way or another.
100 years is a long time, too long for good predictions. In 100 years everyone may have mind control chips that force them to believe in the religion chosen by their government, or civilization may have fallen.
With any luck that will be the case. Shame it isn’t now.
It’s stuck around for thousands of years, so I have scant confidence that a mere century will do away with it completely. Like always it will probably just permuted into a variety more in line with secular values in order to survive, in 1914 the Church of England preached homosexuality as filthy sin, now we the Archbishop of Canterbury talking about ‘building bridges’ over gay marriage. Holy Mother Church likewise changes with the times, His Holiness Pope Francis I has said “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge them?” Such a statement a century ago would be unthinkable from the Bishop of Rome.
That said…I can’t see any circumstances where in the Muslim world people would *ever *even start to think of the Quran alongside a horoscope.
Voltaire said back in the 1700’s that he expected Christianity in 100 years would be looked back as an odd superstition of the past similar to old Greek and Norse mythology.
Humans will always want to turn to a higher power and the more we discover about the world, the more we have to learn.
Machiavelli has a similar quote from the 1500s. He was . . . a little off in his timing, let’s say.
If the OP has specified “Christianity,” then maybe we’d have a little bit of a debate, although I would argue it’d still be in full force. But religion? Religion has been with us since the earliest cave paintings. It’s inherently human. People are in the tricky position of having conscious minds that can predict and dwell on their own demise; religion is a cure to the existential crisis.
Not enough time, in my view. In 100 years, religion will be less of a major part of day-to-day human activity than it is today, but it will still be pretty major, I think.
I can’t even agree that Astrology is looked upon as patently false today. Looks like Voodoo still haspractitioners as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if Astrology is still kicking around in some form under some “Now New and Improved Age” spirituality in 100 years.
No way to know.
It comes, & it goes.
It’ll be around, and strongly so. It’s been around for thousands of years.
In a hundred years it will be essential for most people to belong to one of the robot religions, for networking purposes.
In a hundred years I suspect it will be much as it is now although I do expect a rise in the number of atheistic churches such as the UU and others.
Back in the '60s, many of us believed that religion would be dead by the year 2000.
The thing is, with each of these things we get rid off, we invent two new ones—for each alchemy, there’s now a quantum healing, a The Secret, a Deepak Chopra. I don’t think there’s any humanity-wide trend towards higher rationality, rather, there’s just some set of competing fashions, some go out of style, some come back into style. We look at the silly nonsense back then as silly nonsense that we have progressed so far beyond by overcoming, because we don’t see the silly nonsense of today as silly nonsense yet. It’s always the same old woo in new clothes, and in so far as humanity will always need some crutch to manufacture meaning on the cheap, there will always be a market for it.
So, the people 100 years from now will consider themselves educated and wise beyond our uncivilized savage ways—while perhaps believing that the harmonies of the string vacuum resonate in tune with our pineal gland, so that the right belief can change the probability matrix of the universe—or whatever else the buzzwords of tomorrow will be.
Strongly disagree. God has not allowed religion to vanish, and will not.
I thought this was going to be about religion, not theology. I fear that 100 years from now, the people of the influential nations of the world will be in regimented religious lockstep, somewhat the way the Middle East is now, intolerant of deviant thought. It is baked into authoritarian political power.