RE: Do you think that one day religion will become a thing of the past
December 13, 2015 at 11:32 pm
I think the push against religion is going to hit a critical mass like many revolutions have, and then happen very quickly. I could be totally wrong about that, but it's what I predict, and my wild guess is that it will happen some time in the 2020s or 2030s.
People are underestimating how fast things are changing. "The rise of the nones" is truly a tidal wave. Now, "none" doesn't always mean "atheist", but I think that even the nones will fade out fairly quickly. There is an explosion in media and communication going on right now, and it is only accelerating. People get disabused of their beliefs very quickly, because you can't walk 3 inches without someone picking them apart. That's what happens on the internet, even despite so-called "filter bubbles" that form. There's really no such thing as isolation. Plus you have the rise of millions of videos and other forms of content of atheists speaking out. Where could you find that before? A few books in the philosophy section of the library? Now it is in your face, and extremely accessible.
Christianity fell from 78% to 70% in America from 2007 to today. That's called plummeting. People like to say "X will be around forever", and they are right until they aren't. Things do change, and when it happens, it can happen fast. Whoever said "marijuana will be illegal forever" would be dead wrong. Same with any number of things; that happens to be merely a recent example. But we all know people who said that. We probably said it ourselves. Look what happened.
Science is percolating into the mainstream like never before. That is an absolutely new phenomenon. It wasn't even the case that top intellectuals and thinkers were usually atheistic until a couple hundred years ago. Now they are teaching that evil-lution in public classrooms. Pessimists just aren't taking in all the facts, they are essentializing the world. There are definite reasons to think that things are very much changing, very quickly.
Will there still be pockets? Yeah, for a while. But get ready for religion to die. It's pretty obvious what's happening if you ask me.
People are underestimating how fast things are changing. "The rise of the nones" is truly a tidal wave. Now, "none" doesn't always mean "atheist", but I think that even the nones will fade out fairly quickly. There is an explosion in media and communication going on right now, and it is only accelerating. People get disabused of their beliefs very quickly, because you can't walk 3 inches without someone picking them apart. That's what happens on the internet, even despite so-called "filter bubbles" that form. There's really no such thing as isolation. Plus you have the rise of millions of videos and other forms of content of atheists speaking out. Where could you find that before? A few books in the philosophy section of the library? Now it is in your face, and extremely accessible.
Christianity fell from 78% to 70% in America from 2007 to today. That's called plummeting. People like to say "X will be around forever", and they are right until they aren't. Things do change, and when it happens, it can happen fast. Whoever said "marijuana will be illegal forever" would be dead wrong. Same with any number of things; that happens to be merely a recent example. But we all know people who said that. We probably said it ourselves. Look what happened.
Science is percolating into the mainstream like never before. That is an absolutely new phenomenon. It wasn't even the case that top intellectuals and thinkers were usually atheistic until a couple hundred years ago. Now they are teaching that evil-lution in public classrooms. Pessimists just aren't taking in all the facts, they are essentializing the world. There are definite reasons to think that things are very much changing, very quickly.
Will there still be pockets? Yeah, for a while. But get ready for religion to die. It's pretty obvious what's happening if you ask me.
