Huff post article : Atheism to Defeat Religion By 2038

Cabaal wrote: »

Thats the thing,
I don't think a large or largish religious group are capable of not trying to force their views onto people that don't believe in their god,

Thats the problem with having a god who is 100% right, you believe your views are also right and as such others should live their life by these views and "teachings". This is especially the case when your god (some guy wrote this) tells you to spread the word

It's a fair point but I would predict that as religious belief declines and there's a greater desire for secular government (even among some religious who are less zealous) it will be harder for religious people to join together and form one cohesive argument or set of belief systems. It will fragment, even more than it has now.

Two points:

The methodology here seems to be seriously flawed. The author takes the “nine most godless countries” (why nine, I wonder in passing?), finds their average GDP/capita, and then assumes that when average GDP/capita across the world reaches that level, the average country will be equally godless. But his dataset excludes all the countries whose average GDP/capita is already at that level, but which are not among the most godless. This is the equivalent of taking a dataset of blue-eyed people over 5’ 10” and then extrapolating from your dataset to reach the conclusion that everyone who reaches 5’ 10” will be blue-eyed.

The other thing is that the assumptions which underlie his method are far from neutral. He tells us that he favours the “existential security hypothesis” - that as people’s existential fear recedes, their believe in god diminishes. Fair enough. But then he glides smoothly from existential fear to material prosperity. He assumes, without actually stating his assumption, that as people become more prosperous their existential fears diminish. He is basically importing philosophically materialist (and godless) assumptions; that only material things are real, that all fears are fears of material want, and that material prosperity soothes all fears. Given certain assumptions tending towards godlessness, he argues, certain godless conclusions follows. Well, duh.

His assumption that material prosperity elminates existential fears is nonsense, and there is abundant evidence that it is nonsense. We only have to look at an extremely prosperous country like the US, and the existential fears that gripped it collectively after 9/11 - and indeed that still grip it. In many respects, far from prosperity reducing your fears it increases them because, the more wealth you have, and the more faith you place in the wealth you have to give you want you want and need, the more you have to lose, and the bigger your fear of losing it. You live in fear that the rest of the world is jealous of you (“they hate our freedom!” - George W Bush) and is envious of your wealth and will try to take it from you by, e.g. swarming across your borders in brown-skinned Spanish-speaking hordes. You convince yourself, in the teeth of the evidence, that terrorists want to establish an Islamic caliphate in your country.

Do I exaggerate? Possibly a little, but I think the point is fair enough. Prosperity doesn’t eliminate existential fear; it just gives you a different set of existential fears. If existential fear is, at root, the fear of death, then until prosperity buys immortality it’s foolish to think that it can eliminate existential fear.

Cabaal wrote: »

and as we know....Linux is the work of the devil, need proof? I give you BSD

BSD is a 'real Unix' (originally built around proprietary AT&T Unix)
Linux is 'unix-like' but is not a Unix. (Just ignore what the 'passwd' command says )