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Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says
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22-03-2011 10:24am#1
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the Britons? Who are they?Apparently 60%+ of Britons are not religious.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12799801
sorry, got it into my head as soon as i read it and it wouldn't go away. :pac:0 -
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Tedious work "netmeetings" and internet posting do not mix.Tin Foil Hat wrote: »Methinks someone has misplaced their spectacles!
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The last 2000 years of history are littered with similar false predictions.
What is happening is that nominal State-sponsored religions (that need cultural dominance) are indeed declining in the Western world, but there is also an increase in other non-mainstream groups (that tend to thrive in a counter-cultural context). So expect less and less intrusion of Catholicism in public life, but also expect to be meeting many more individual God-botherers and Bible-bashers in the workplace, on the street, and in family gatherings!
For example, in Dublin 15 there are now 45 Evangelical Churches - whereas 10 years ago there was one. There will certainly be more people in D15 who class themselves as non-religious, but it is certainly not extinction. Expect smaller numbers of believers, but they will increasingly be of the more fundamentalist type (both Christian and Muslim) .0 -
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This is a good point, and not necessarily a bad thing IMO. To a certain extent, the rise in atheism is about a challenge to taboos, much like the continued normalisation of homosexuality has been.So expect less and less intrusion of Catholicism in public life, but also expect to be meeting many more individual God-botherers and Bible-bashers in the workplace, on the street, and in family gatherings!
In the western world (all of the world?) atheism has long been the taboo. While a lot of the religions have spent thousands of years slaughtering eachother, they all generally agreed on one thing; There is a god. Someone who declared "You guys are nuts, there's no God" was everybody's enemy. A demon.
This has persisted and still persists to a certain extent. Could you imagine in 1950s Ireland declaring that you don't believe in God? Shure Jaysus, it would be bad enough if he was a Prod or a Jew, but he doesn't even believe in God. You'd be shunned and spat on in the street by everyone.
Think about the removal of homosexuality as a taboo. I was too young really to see it, but I imagine many people thought that homosexuality was growing; that more and more people were "becoming" gay as the number of public homosexuals increased. In reality the number of homosexuals has never changed; it's generally agreed that the number of homosexuals in a given population remains static across the planet (despite the difficulty in getting accurate numbers).
This is the same trend that we will see with atheism. And indeed that we are seeing. In general, it's not so much that atheism is growing, but that increasingly people are less afraid to declare their atheism and to discuss their philosophical doubts. People who would have been "in the closet" so to speak, denying their doubts about God, feel less social restriction on exploring and discussing these doubts with their peers and ultimately deciding that this God stuff is not for them, without fear of being outcast.
Atheists "outing" themselves too mirrors homosexuality in a number of ways - some become preachy and excessively in-your-face about it.
To get back to your original point, when people start leaving the grey area because they're not afraid to, religion will become something for the adherents, not for the masses. This will mean that the outwardly religious will stand out more in public settings, but with the interference in civil matters removed, hopefully the population at large will regard them as curious but "sure leave them at it" fringe groups, like the Amish are in the US.0 -
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Christian predictions that didn't work?The last 2000 years of history are littered with similar false predictions.
Matthew 24:29-34
Been at it a long time
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Oh dear.
Scepticism isn’t what it used to be, I fear.
Seamus obligingly provides a link to the study, which is not that long. The study is quite explicit that it analyses not actual societies but a theoretical model of an idealised society. In this theoretical society:
(a) the growth of the “non-religious” segment of society is driven by a single parameter quantifying the perceived utility of adhering to a religion; and
(b) the perceived utility of adhering to a religion is a function of how many members it has, and of the social, economic, political and security benefits derived from membership.
Taking census data on religious identification from real-life societies, the study looks at what this data would imply in such a theoretical society. It predicts “continued growth of non-affiliation, tending towards the disappearance of religion”. (Note that it doesn’t predict the disappearance of religion, just a tendency towards that. That’s a level of subtlety that escaped the journalists who reported on this.)
But the prediction doesn’t apply to the real world, except to the extent that the assumptions made about the model society in fact reflect reality. There is no evidence at all that they do. You would expect a sceptic to be the first to point this out, but nobody in this thread has done this. You need to lift your game, lads, if you hope to make scepticism look attractive or credible. If even sceptics abandon scepticism, why should anyone else take it up?
But there’s more. The study makes no assumptions about why people choose a religious affiliation; it focuses entirely on people who choose a non-religious affiliation. So all those assumptions about the tendency to follow the herd, and about affiliation being driven by a hunt for social, economic and other advantages are assumptions about the non-religious. In short, people in this thread who welcome the study and agree with its conclusions are endorsing the view that the non-religious become so in a quest for group membership and for social , economic and political advantage, and not at all out of anything like, you know, a philosophical conviction, or the pursuit of truth, or honesty, or anything so high-minded. (Which, if true, would explain why they so readily abandon scepticism themselves, and reinforce their group membership by smugly agreeing with one another about the accuracy and prescience of this study). 0 -
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the bolding thing is actually a pretty good idea.Peregrinus wrote: »The bolding is deliberate, though. It was a convention on another board that I used to frequent to bold the names of other contributors to the discussion, so they could easily see where they were being talked about, and it's a habit I've got into.
you could try typing in notepad instead, it doesn't pick up any erroneous formatting like you seem to be getting in ms word.0 -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xd_zkMEgkI
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