The Decline of Religion

recedite wrote: »

We're half way there now. And for the other half of this equation, what is the solution to the issue of low fertility rates in the more developed/civilised/secular societies of Europe and East Asia? I assume it is not, therefore, the encouragement of even more contraception and abortion.

And there you go again with an unsupported assumption. You have failed miserably throughout this thread to come up with anything other than misrepresentation, unsupported assertions coupled with specious assumption all leading to dubious conclusion. And no, before you ask, speculate, assume or go for the Vulcan mind meld once again, I don't share your assumption above. In my opinion, access to family planning is a cornerstone of any modern egalitarian democracy. The population problem encountered by countries that have only had access to family planning for one or two generations is an aging population no one of size, which is something that is entirely self correcting. We live in a highly automated society, not in Victorian London. We don't need manual laborers to the extent we once did, so the size of our population is very much what we choose it to be.

Also, let me remind you that the only person that raised immigration as solution to population control was yourself. This is your line of thought and yours alone. While you purport to know what I think, you clearly don't have the vaguest clue.

recedite wrote: »

In fact a figure of around 2.3 children per female is considered to be the replacement rate, as per this chart. Anything below that is certainly not self-correcting. Sadly you are still refusing to accept reality. "Family Planning" is your cure-all solution.

How exactly do you think the replacement figure of 2.3 children per female needed for a static population size is ever likely to be achieved without family planning? Populations aren't naturally static. Most animals will grow to meet the available food source, lose numbers though starvation as they exhaust the supply, rinse and repeat. The foxes and rabbits game is a simple illustration of this. As a society of intelligent people with the luxury of high levels of automation, we don't have to play this game any more. We can choose to have children when we want children and in doing so keep our numbers at a level where no one has to starve. The notion of limiting access to family planning is in my opinion barbaric, and tantamount to forcing women to have children against their will. FWIW, many couples in this country delay having children for financial reasons, notably accommodation, childcare and healthcare costs. If we wanted to encourage people to have more children, these are the issues to address. Suggesting that banning contraception and abortion as a solution is as dumb as it is offensive.

You'll notice in the bottom right hand corner, all the countries gathered which have shrinking populations. These societies are generally prosperous, secular and value women's rights.
In the top left, the exporters of refugees and migrants. These societies are usually highly religious, poverty stricken and often at war.https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

Which takes us neatly back to how this conversation started; the "unexpected" increase in religiosity being experienced in the world as a whole, and in many formerly secular countries such as Sweden.

Outside of obviously wanting to live in a prosperous secular society that values women's rights, you might want to look at average life expectancy in conjunction with fertility rates and the resulting total population size. A quick look at life expectancy versus income on GapMinder shows us that while birth rates were higher in the past, life expectancy was far lower.

Increased religiosity seems to go hand in hand with poverty, poor women's rights and human rights in general and decreased life expectancy. Not sure where you're going with you clip about Somali refugees looking for better housing in Sweden, other than as a reference to your own rant about migration.

recedite wrote: »

Amazing how many rabbitholes you create while avoiding the relevant issues (which I think I have already outlined adequately)

What relevant issues have you outlined precisely, because I for one amn't seeing any? All I'm seeing in your posts are deliberate misrepresentation and a vague antipathy towards migrants and family planning.

recedite wrote: »

There are none so blind as those who will not see.
BTW those weren't Somalians in that video clip, they were New Swedes. And very religious ones too. And much more prolific than old swedes.

Perhaps you could state your point more directly. The impression I get is that we shouldn't allow black islamic refugees into Europe because they'll outbreed the good upstanding white people and smother us in Allah and melanin. We can maybe counter this by denying local women access to contraception to force them to keep up. Is that it or have I missed something more profound?

Pero_Bueno wrote: »

I hope Christianity ceases to exist, terrible terrible things the RCC has done to Ireland in the past.
If only we could have a peaceful religion like Islam take hold here, that will make us all liberals super happy!

Can't speak for anyone else here, but as an atheist I think all religions are different flavours of the same nonsense and as a secularist I fully support people's right to practise whatever religion they choose just so long as they don't try to foist it on others (notably me and my family). To my mind Islam in many countries today is like Catholicism in Ireland in the '50s '60s and '70s. Autocratic, homophobic, and misogynistic where religion is beyond allowable criticism. We've largely got over that crap, and I can see no reason why most muslims won't over time. For all that, I've spent a fair bit of time in a number of Islamic majority countries and I'd have to say that by and large the people were really warm and friendly. People aren't their religion either and reducing how you think of them in such a limited way helps no one.

recedite wrote: »

Well I'm not sure if anyone reputable considers this to be "pseudoscience". Its probably part science and part philosophy.

Wikipedia specifically makes reference to mimetics as a pseudoscience, e.g.

Luis Benitez-Bribiesca, a critic of memetics, calls it "a pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution" among other things.

If you have a brief look through some of the references, we see the following quote by Dawkins himself

Richard Dawkins, Time Magazine, 1999 wrote:

I am occasionally accused of having backtracked on memes, of having lost heart, pulled in my horns, had second thoughts. The truth is that my first thoughts were more modest than some memeticists might wish. For me the original mission was negative. The word was introduced at the end of a book that otherwise must have seemed entirely devoted to extolling the “selfish” gene as the be-all and end-all of evolution, the fundamental unit of selection. There was a risk that my readers would misunderstand the message as being necessarily about DNA molecules. . . . This was where the meme came in

To talk about evolution, a globally accepted scientific subject taught in schools and colleges worldwide that has been subjected to rigorous and intense scrutiny, and mean mimetics is misleading.

recedite wrote: »

Who is Luis Benitez-Bribiesca anyway? A quick google indicates he died 2 years ago, but worked in the Mexican Dept. of Social Security. Is that the Mexican dole office?
I think I'll go with Daniel Dennett on this one.

With over a hundred citations on Research Gate, I'd suggest a rather more well informed source than you seem to be implying, and one of many such critics of memetics, including the likes of Steven Pinker.

Either way some narrowly followed amalgam of science and philosophy as you put it is a very far cry from evolution, as it is widely understood, in terms of credibility or broad acceptance. Even the term mimetics itself, as derived from Dawkins' work, isn't the common use of that word that you'd find a dictionary. It certainly isn't a science from what I can see, yet it follows the naming conventions of genetics to give the impression that it is one. It seems very much like a linguistic framework to support discussion among a group of people that buy into certain theories, and certainly wide open to scepticism.

antiskeptic wrote: »

There would be nothing wrong with going forth and multiplying if it wasn't shackled to capitalism's identical-with-a-twist motto: go forth and multiply at the expense of anyone who you can dominate to fuel the multiplication.

There is more than plenty to sustain far more life on earth .. were it not for the fact that to concentrate the wealth in a small sector of the world, the rest has to be raped.

That doesn't matter. The earth is a finite resource, so if you look to continually increase the size of the human population by multiples you see exponential growth that at some point exhausts those resources and results in a population collapse at best or extinction at worst. More sensibly, at a social level, we control our own population growth to maintain optimal population levels.