Religion will simply adapt.
It’s a cycle. Spirituality and communication with God has nothing to do with religion in any practical sense. Religion is just some asked for, and later enforced, rules that simulate this relationship for those who seek a shortcut, or to be more kind are not ready to have a direct contact with absolute Love who is the source of the person’s absolute being and ultimate destiny.
Just like empire rise and fall, there will be periods of strict religion, even enforced and periods where religion is relegated to the back burner and almost insignificant.
There is nothing new under the sun. And BTW Voodoo is a religion.
I thought that was the Karma Chameleon.
Great, IOW, we will have made no progress, merely switched positions.
Looking at this list of major genocide events, it’s striking how poorly it supports your statement.
And it’s questionable if even the Holocaust is a valid example. It’s clear the Nazis who organized this thought of it as racially motivated - something it has in common with many others on the list.
Not on this list is another event that had nothing to do with religion and led to the deaths of between 18- and 30-some million: Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
Indeed. It is most widespread in Islam, but still clings here and there in other Abrahamic faiths as a minority practice. And of course there are myriad non-Abrahamic examples as well.
I think most people might be surprised at just how widespread ritual animal sacrifice remains in the world at large.
People is the reason for genocide, terrorism and war. Eliminate religious faith and we’ll find something else to murder each other over. I am convinced it is intrinsic to the species - at the end of the day we’re pack animals that love our in-groups and fear and loath our out-groups.
Atheists, sadly, have no monopoly on morality.
My UU church runs the gamut from atheists to Christians. I probably find more areas of agreement with the atheists in my current church than I would with the Christians in the church I grew up in.
Religion, in one form or another, has existed as far back as recorded time, and it pretty much universal - from massive churches to a shaman in a tiny, remote village, there is religion.
When a supply plane can create a religion (the oft-cited “Cargo Cult”), there is something about religion that people desperately want.
It ain’t going nowhere…
As an atheist, I would like to see it step back form the Us-vs-Them mentality so many promote. but I suspect that is a large part of what makes them appealing - you, who are a loser by all measurement, are really superior to all those “winners”, because you have the only true God, and they’ll get whats coming to them when they die!
(we are a pathetic species, aren’t we?)
It may be a case of YMMV. The one ordained UU minister I’ve worked with is (for lack of a better phrase) a devout atheist and most of the two congregations he served that I visited fit that bill. There were some who did believe in some form of god but they were a distinct minority in these two cases. And according to him, at least, the National church is following that trend.
I understand the belief in a Great Awakening and as a Lutheran I sure hope for one. But to be honest I just don’t see it happening.
We should keep in mind that smallpox co-existed with humanity for thousands of years as well. Then it didn’t.
(For the nitpickers - yes, smallpox still exists in a few labs. But it currently exists more in theory than in practice. And if anyone is offended by the comparison of religion with a virus, consider a different analogy instead: Humanity lived alongside passenger pigeons for thousands of years. Then they didn’t.)
In 100 years religion will still be around but will likely be reduced in influence. I base this on the centuries-long trend of religion being around but decreasingly influential.
Just in the past couple of decades religion in the West went from (mostly) being opposed to homosexuality to (mostly) being more or less okay with it. Religion was used by many as a reason why homosexual marriage (or even homosexual sex) should remain illegal. I don’t know if there are still states in the US that outlaw sodomy, but there are certainly fewer than there used to be. And homosexual marriage is legal in many states now; in another decade or so, it will likely be legal everywhere in the US. While religion isn’t the only reason some people oppose(d) homosexual rights, religious organizations have been its strongest and most virulent opponents. Now, their influence in this area has waned and will continue to do so in the near future.
Divorce laws are another example of the waning power of religious belief in the West. I could also cite changes in abortion rights and free speech rights with respect to obscenity and profanity. Sure, I still can’t buy liquor on a Sunday. But the general trend seems clear enough. Religion will absolutely be around in 100 years, but we shouldn’t let that fact lead us to believe that the status quo will remain unchanged.
If you’re proposing the analogous wholesale slaughter of religious people, pursued over a long period, then perhaps they could be eliminated. Not otherwise.
Well, a big historical impetus for disbelief in Astrology in the West is Christians separating out beliefs into categories of “superstition” and “religion” and then attacking the former. Similarly, an American cultural bias against voodoo owes itself to accusations of heresy, though with a healthy dollop of racism to further delegitimize it. I’m not sure about alchemy. Still, belief in them endures. Although I think perpetual motion energy generation (or whatever it’s called) may have taken alchemy’s place.
I think the value assumptions of ‘modernity’ as a specific movement with roots in the West do tend to push people away from many religions. If those continue to spread as they are, then a great weakening of traditional religions wouldn’t be a big surprise. However, they probably will continue to evolve in the face of continued resistance from many of the people they have been imposed on, and the always surprising tendencies of the many people who have embraced them. Even if we extrapolate current trends to the future, I think it is still too unclear.
A society that, upon discovering that its basic codified interpretations of how the universe works are not backed up by observational data, refuses to accept that its fundamental assumptions are wrong and develops more and more outlandish theories to account for the discrepancy, to the point where it’s hard for observers to keep from breaking down and laughing, is really not in any position to call irrational and scoff at others who do exactly the same thing. Whether it’s dark matter or an invisible man in the sky makes no difference.
That said, I disagree strongly with your assertion, Robert163. There’s a substantial difference between ‘religion’ and ‘people believing in god(s)’. I would assert that the latter isn’t going anywhere, but the former definitely isn’t; if all one looks at is the horrors done in the name of religion (of which there’s no shortage; I’m not contesting that), then one won’t see the good done in its name. Here in the US (I can’t speak for the rest of the world) much of the initial impetus to end slavery started with religious fundamentalists. The Salvation Army, the YMCA, the Mormon Relief Society- there are countless others.
An individual doesn’t need a faith or religion of any kind to form the basis of a system of ethics, of course; but a society doesn’t have the same luxury. Religion is, even there, not the only option; but it provides a fast, simple, reliable way to not only encourage specific behavior patterns, but increase social cohesion among both in- and out-groups. That said cohesion is very, very easy to abuse is unfortunate; but that’s a limitation of human psychology, not religion specifically.
Just the opposite, actually. It comes and it stays. Influence over individual people and nations may wax and wane, but religion itself hasn’t gone anywhere- nor will it.
The late Christopher Hitchens described religion as “fossilized philosophy”, which I quite like.
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Religiosity has a significant heritable component, and religious people tend to have more children than nonreligious ones. (Obviously, the heritability thing needs some fleshing out. Which specific religion you are is not very heritable, but how strongly you practice that religion is moderately heritable. Also, this applies only to adults: among children, religion is obviously not heritable at all).
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Agnosticism and atheism tend to have a much lower retention rate than most religions. (In the United States, for example, a person raised atheist/agnostic/nonreligious has about a 46% chance of becoming a Christian as an adult, whereas a person raised Christian has only a 14% chance of becoming nonreligious).
I don’t know if those two trends will hold indefinitely, but if they do, Christianity (at least) isn’t going anywhere in the medium term. Indeed, the trends look fairly good. (Some Christian churches, specifically the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ, do lose a lot of people to agnosticism/atheism, so they may need to be worried more than most other churches).
A significant part of Mainline Protestant Churches’ decline as a share of US population also has to do with a relatively low birth rate (especially when compared to evangelicals) stretching back before WWII, and less reinforcement from immigration.
Um, no, they aren’t at all alike. Dark matter is something that we can clearly see the effects of, and “discovering that its basic codified interpretations of how the universe works are not backed up by observational data” is a description of religion not science. Science is “The data doesn’t match the theory, so change the theory”.
And so did the *support *for slavery. And much of the opposition to slavery wasn’t for moral reasons; it was because the slavers wouldn’t let the slaves read the Bible, or because Catholics and Protestants at the time tended to take opposite positions on everything by reflex.
No, it doesn’t. It decreases social cohesion, it turns people against each other. How is it “social cohesion” when family members incited by religion turn on each other?
Nor is religion even capable of providing the basis of a system of ethics. It makes assertions and demands they be taken on faith, while demanding that flesh and blood people and their suffering be ignored in favor of their imaginary souls and imaginary gods; which if anything is the opposite of ethics.
100 years is a drop in the bucket. Organized religion has been around for over 2000 years.
Were I to confine my response to people in the USA I would be reasonably certain that religions would still be a part of peoples lives. As others have noted, 100 years is not enough time for such a drastic change like this. For other countries that have been around longer it could be possible.