tl;dr
I think in the long term, atheism is on the rise due to the ever-growing body of scientific knowledge explaning religious wonders and rendering it obsolete in some areas.
In the short term, I think people are just becoming a little more 'aware'. There are a lot of people who claim a religious label for social reasons, and really don't have strong religious convictions. It's more of a tradition than a lifestyle. Recently things like the 9/11 attacks and the Westboro Baptist Church stand as widely publicized examples of why religion is damaging, and I think they've made a lot of people think twice about defaulting to a religious stance. Not just on a person-to-person level, but it's spawned a cultural backlash against religion, with the high-profile "New Atheist" movement that saw things like The God Delusion, God is not Great, and Religulous hit the mainstream.
That was rambling and probably didn't make sense.
I think in the long term, atheism is on the rise due to the ever-growing body of scientific knowledge explaning religious wonders and rendering it obsolete in some areas.
In the short term, I think people are just becoming a little more 'aware'. There are a lot of people who claim a religious label for social reasons, and really don't have strong religious convictions. It's more of a tradition than a lifestyle. Recently things like the 9/11 attacks and the Westboro Baptist Church stand as widely publicized examples of why religion is damaging, and I think they've made a lot of people think twice about defaulting to a religious stance. Not just on a person-to-person level, but it's spawned a cultural backlash against religion, with the high-profile "New Atheist" movement that saw things like The God Delusion, God is not Great, and Religulous hit the mainstream.
That was rambling and probably didn't make sense.
- Meatball
