(February 24, 2019 at 12:30 pm)Brian37 Wrote: What makes you think, your specific religion and or sect, will survive forever?
It looks as if any set of beliefs about the world breaks down after a while. (And here I use "belief" merely to mean "something we hold to be true.")
So rather than challenge others, it's maybe also interesting to ask how our own views are likely to hold up over the next millennium or so.
I know of course that in the broad definition, atheism is merely a lack of belief in god or gods. However, the reasons that people have these days for rejecting the claims of religious people are frequently of an identifiable kind. Something along the lines of:
~ Science is the best way to know about the world.
~ If there were a god or gods they would be the sort of thing that science could observe.
~ Science doesn't observe anything like that, therefore my lack of belief is justified.
I wonder how much of this is likely to last.
It could go two ways, I guess. First, while this view is growing in some places, in other places traditional religion is still popular. There is no way to know which will gain popularity in the long run.
Second, we might lose confidence in the scientific method as something which addresses everything we need to know about. Or there might be increased popularity in those older concepts of god which place it as something science can't address by definition.
So our own view seems surprisingly fragile to me.
