(August 26, 2013 at 4:06 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: Our numbers won't increase because we're more fertile. They wil increase because we make more sense and we're no longer silent and invisible.

Perhaps atheists should start fucking everything that moves just in case?

(August 26, 2013 at 3:59 pm)The Germans are coming Wrote: I wouldn`t think that way, people throughout the western world used to breed like rabbits aswell 100 years ago.
I have heared the argument of the "breeding muslims" very frequently, thing is that it is easyly disproven and has nothing to do with Islam. 20 years ago, the birthrates in Algeria and Turkey were at an average of 4 and 5 children per family, with an economic boom in both countries, the spreading of wealth and the creation of a large middle class birth rates in both countries sunk to an average of 2 and 1. something per family. In fact it was found by researchers that the second generation of muslim immigrants to Europe addapt their birthrate into the national average.

Religion is certainly not the most contributing factor that leads to a big number of children per family. It is poverty, which is why birthrates in impoverished regions, that are not muslim, are also very high.

I do not doubt that in very religious places like Saudi Arabia and the southern states of the US is a big contributer to a high birthrate, but in the majority of cases it is simply poverty.

Other than that, I read that the high birthrates in countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and Sudan are less benefitial for the society (in terms of creating a religious demographic) because they create problems such as famine, drought and massive unemployment together with all the other destructive factores a overpopulated country can have. At least that`s the case in Egypt, where overpopulation has lead to a shortage of food, massive undereducation amongst the population, water shortage, famine and social disorder.

If Islam has nothing or very little to do with birthrates how come they have the highest birthrates in the United States. I think anyone who doesn't believe that religion has an affect on birthrates just hasn't looked at the data available. Orthodox Jews out-breed secular Jews. Catholics in Northern Ireland out-breed the the secular and the protestants. Muslims in first world countries outbreed everyone around them.

Obviously doctrine is affecting these people. I'm not quite sure where you get your data on 2nd Generation Muslims adapting to modern birthrates, but that really doesn't help your case anyway. That would just mean more secular Muslims have lower birthrates than the less Secular ones. Across the board in every culture the religious outbreed secular people.

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(August 26, 2013 at 4:06 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: Our numbers won't increase because we're more fertile. They wil increase because we make more sense and we're no longer silent and invisible.

I agree and it's obviously backed up statistically. However will the world kill itself through overpopulation or wars before everyone becomes sane?

(August 26, 2013 at 4:35 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: However will the world kill itself through overpopulation or wars before everyone becomes sane?

Yup.

(August 26, 2013 at 3:30 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: While secularism easily is winning the war of ideas, is it possible that we (and possibly the planet) are doomed because we will simply be out-bred by the religious.

You just gotta let the battle of Genes vs. Memes take its course to find the answer to that.

Most likely not, in my opinion.

We need either more public schools for the children or maybe an intolerant atheist school. Intolerant in a helpful way, of course!

The kind of school where the teacher argues with a student if the student forms and asserts some illogical belief.

(August 26, 2013 at 3:30 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: While secularism easily is winning the war of ideas, is it possible that we (and possibly the planet) are doomed because we will simply be out-bred by the religious.

I figure that the religious have always "out-bred" the non-religious. It's the part about winning the war of ideas that will matter in the long run. I think that a fair number of those offspring are going to be part of the next generation of skeptics and rational thinkers.

How many of us were born to atheist parents and raised as atheists? Not I.

My mother (and 99% of my family) is still religious. My nephew is another atheist born to religious parents. I don't think that idea of children automatically assuming the religion of their parents is necessarily true, though it happens quite often. But I'm betting that number drops as information is easily available on the internet. It was far easier to keep kids indoctrinated back when they actually had to go to the library to look stuff up.

(August 27, 2013 at 12:19 pm)Doubting Thomas Wrote: My mother (and 99% of my family) is still religious. My nephew is another atheist born to religious parents. I don't think that idea of children automatically assuming the religion of their parents is necessarily true, though it happens quite often. But I'm betting that number drops as information is easily available on the internet. It was far easier to keep kids indoctrinated back when they actually had to go to the library to look stuff up.

You're in a good situation there, get in their heads, INFLUENCE THEM, win them over to our side.

Just kidding. (OR AM I?)

I'm curious what effect you see the religious outbreeding the non-religious having. It's easy to say that they are outbreeding the non-religious, in a chicken little, "the sky is falling," sort of way, but what is the pragmatic effect? Following on Germans' point, there is a well documented link between affluence and birth rate; the more affluent one is, the less babies one is likely to have — regardless of religious belief. Whether religious belief in and of itself has a significant impact upon fertility rates, and how much, is unclear from this data as it does not appear to adjust for confounding factors like socio-economic status, education level, race, and so on.

Moreover, it's important to ask what is being done with those numbers. Five children scrabbling to survive working for $18,000 a year are likely to have less effect than one university professor, regardless of her salary. One wealthy liberal will have more effect than a hundred struggling fundamentalists, who themselves are saddled with the cost of that high birthrate in terms of raising their brood. (In the U.S., a low-income family with four children will spend $700,000 raising them to maturity, or 18 years worth of income; a middle-class family raising two children will spend $470,000 or 6 years of their income. There's a reason poor children start work earlier than more affluent children. The differences result in fewer educational opportunities and so on. Perhaps the religious will have more children, but if those children are condemned to occupy the lower rungs of the ladder, what of it?)

There is a theory from psychology which has had an enormous impact on me over the years, known as Vroom's Expectancy Theory. Basically, the theory states that it takes more than the desire for some change or result to motivate a person to make the changes desired or bring about the result. Vroom's theory suggests that motivation requires both that the individual possess the instrumental utility or means to achieve the goal, and that the person must be aware that they possess the means to achieve the goal. I'm not sure whether this is a part of Vroom's theory, but I would add that knowledge that one's situation without the change is unpleasant, and that one's situation after the change is pleasant, and being aware of the difference affects motivation. (This is often a major goal in psychotherapy, helping the person to become aware of how their behavior is contributing to their unhappiness, and developing an existential anxiety with respect to the continuance of those behaviors.) The subjective difference between one's current distress and one's anticipated relief must be greater than whatever subjective distress one experiences in making the change in order for the person to follow through in changing. (Changing is usually stressful in and of itself, and if that stress is greater than the anticipated reward, the attempt will likely be aborted. Another aspect worth noting is how quickly or visibly the reward materializes; if a change in behavior doesn't result in a reward rather quickly, the person will also likely abandon the change.) The question then becomes, even if the religious have greater numbers than the non-religious, are they likely to have greater impact or power than the non-religious. Whose efforts and effects in the world have the better chance of succeeding? That's a question which, in marketing, is referred to as reach. How much reach do those numbers have?

It's been my impression, or hunch, if you will, that the greater numbers are balanced by negatives which correspond to those breeding in greater numbers, so the overall effect is more or less in balance. I think this makes sense from an ecological perspective. The human species has evolved to display a range of behaviors dependent on the environment. Where having babies is the best way to exploit the environment, they will have babies; when having few children and investing in them heavily is best, that's what humans do. The latter is the general form of our reproductive strategy; we succeed by quality rather than quantity, as say, in bacteria. The question is whether religion itself is a dependent variable on its own that alters the overall behavior of the species with respect to the see-saw of fertility? I don't see that the question has been answered, but I didn't dig into your material very deeply. My impression was that the larger question was not answered, and that some faulty assumptions such as those under-girding eugenics and social Darwinism are uncritically embedded in the analysis.