Atheism is unstoppable.

[Silver]

[RoadRunner79]

Sorry... I won’t mess with your delusions.

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The argument from gnomes isn’t critical thinking, it’s lazy thinking, and really just stating your a priori bias.

[SteveII]

Your opinion is that it will die off. You don't seem to have any reasons it will die off. 

Your ability to have a discussion without insulting the other person is noted.

---

Why do you think more adults convert to Christianity than any other religion (by far)? See--this is how a conversation goes. Instead of mocking grandstanding, you can ask for reasons for my belief. Even though you don't didn't ask, here is the evidence I have. 

• Pew Research estimates that 40 million people are expected to convert to Christianity between 2010-2050, and 106 million people are expected to leave Christianity during that period (resulting in a net loss of 66 million).[3] This is in contrast to most other religions, including Islam and Hinduism, where the number converting in is roughly similar to the number converting out.[3]
  
  
• According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, approximately 2.7 million people convert to Christianity annually from another religion, with Christianity ranking first in net gains through religious conversion.[12]
  
  
• Studies estimate significantly more people have converted from Islam to Christianity in the 21st century than at any other point in Islamic history.[13] Conversion to Christianity has also been well documented, and reports estimate that hundreds of thousands of Muslims convert to Christianity annually. Significant numbers of Muslims converts to Christianity can be found in Afghanistan, Albania,[14] Azerbaijan,[15][16] Algeria,[17] Belgium,[18] Bulgaria,[19][20] France,[21] Germany,[22] Indonesia,[23] Iran,[24][25][26][27] Kazakhstan,[28]Kyrgyzstan,[29] Malaysia,[30] Morocco,[31][32] Netherlands,[33] Russia,[34] Saudi Arabia,[35] Tunisia,[36] Turkey,[37][38][39][40] Kosovo,[41] The United States[42] and Central Asia etc.[43][44] Many of the Muslims who convert to Christianity faces social rejection or imprisonment and sometimes murder or penalty, for becoming Christians.[45]
  
  
• Data from the Pew Research Center show that, as of 2013, about 1.6 million adult American Jews identify themselves as Christians; most are Protestant.[46][47][48] According to the same data, most of this group were raised as Jews or are Jews by ancestry.[47] Data from 2013, show that 64,000 Argentine Jews identify themselves as Christians.[49] According to 2012 study 17% of Jews in Russia identify themselves as Christians.[50][51]
  
  
• Conversion into Christianity has significantly increased among Korean,[52] Chinese,[53] and Japanese in the United States.[54] In 2012, the percentage of Christians in these communities were 71%, 30% and 37% respectively.[55]
  
  
• Due to conversion, the number of Chinese Christians has increased significantly; from 4 million before 1949 to 67 million in 2010.[56][57]
  
  
• Due to conversion, Christianity has grown in South Korea, from 2.0% in 1945[58] to 29.3% in 2010.[56]
  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_...Conversion

Any questions/comments? How about the first bullet? What do you think that means?

And I'm sure the statistics about conversion to Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and so on would be interesting as well. Here's the thing, atheists are getting more and more plentiful every year. Every year people are stepping away from ALL OF IT. The happiest places on Earth all show an upward trend in non-belief and non-religiousness. The more realized people are, the more they understand religion is unnecessary.

Atheists also tend to be college educated. Interesting. It's almost as if critical thinking has something to do with belief in god. And as more and more people learn to think critically, more and more people will question god. More and more people will ultimately come to the understanding that there's no reason for belief in god, because it is a fairy tale.

I understand. You don't really want to have a discussion on the reasons or anything. You just want to prove your very weak point that there are atheists and there will be more atheists tomorrow because the world's population is larger--AND NOT because their position is more appealing in any way. Got it!  Why make an entire thread with such a lame observation?

[Nay_Sayer]

I understand. You don't really want to have a discussion on the reasons or anything. You just want to prove your very weak point that there are atheists and there will be more atheists tomorrow because the world's population is larger--AND NOT because their position is more appealing in any way. Got it!  Why make an entire thread with such a lame observation?

Why make a book with such a lame, fake, mostly plagiarised resurrection story?

Such a hardened heart. FSM wept.

[SteveII]

I understand. You don't really want to have a discussion on the reasons or anything. You just want to prove your very weak point that there are atheists and there will be more atheists tomorrow because the world's population is larger--AND NOT because their position is more appealing in any way. Got it!  Why make an entire thread with such a lame observation?

Why make a book with such a lame, fake, mostly plagiarised resurrection story?

Such a hardened heart. FSM wept.

I'm tired of you following me around and replying with absolute stupidity.

Are you 13 years old? If not, that just means you are an adult that lacks character. Either way, I will no longer be seeing your posts. I had three more sentences, but I deleted them--they were really unkind.

[Nay_Sayer]

Why make a book with such a lame, fake, mostly plagiarised resurrection story?

Such a hardened heart. FSM wept.

I'm tired of you following me around and replying with absolute stupidity.

Are you 13 years old? If not, that just means you are an adult that lacks character. Either way, I will no longer be seeing your posts. I had three more sentences, but I deleted them--they were really unkind.

That's not very loving. As most misguided christians are you dwell in a mire of hate.

ETA: 1000th post

I pray continually for you. RAmen

[Mystic]

I'm tired of you following me around and replying with absolute stupidity.

Are you 13 years old? If not, that just means you are an adult that lacks character. Either way, I will no longer be seeing your posts. I had three more sentences, but I deleted them--they were really unkind.

That's not very loving. As most misguided christians are you dwell in a mire of hate.

ETA: 1000th post

I pray continually for you. RAmen

Congrats on 1000th post.

[Abaddon_ire]

I always find these assessments of atheism amusing. Jolly old Ireland is painted as only 10% atheist, 90% holy roman catholic. Since this is where I live, I know that is a lie. In actual fact, the reverse is the case.

How do I know that? Well, jolly old roman catholic Ireland was the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage BY POPULAR VOTE.  A moment of pride for me in my countrymen. Abortion is getting wheeled in, blasphemy laws are being rejected and ejected, the priesthood is getting nailed for it's transgressions both current and past. Sure, the cross dressing freaks are backpedalling enough to power the Titanic, but they are losing their grip, a grip they clung to for so long.

When I was a kid there were three to four priests in every parish, now there are three to four parishes for every priest. That is a sea change. Next up is a referendum to kill the stupid blasphemy laws. That will also pass.

The vatican thought it had a vulcan death grip on us. They are struggling with the notion that they do not.

Frankly, the god botherers place their faith in the likes of this chap...



Now, one might think that the good christians abhorred that crap, but no. The Vatican simply shuffled him around as a priest hoping it would all vanish by magic. Not only that, they made sure that this evil bastard had contact with children everywhere he went. Isn't that so christian?

And lest you think I am victimising christianity, the very same religious crapola led 19 wingnuts to murder roughly 3,000 people in new york on religious bases.

Religion is harmless? No it bloody well is not

[Angrboda]

College helps to hone one's critical thinking, no doubt

Um... I doubt. It will in some cases. In a lot of cases, not. 

I just want to avoid begging the question. "He must have good critical skills because he's an atheist." And how do we know that atheists have good critical thinking skills? "Because they're atheists."

The study that has become most emblematic of higher education's failure to teach critical-thinking skills to college students is Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift (2011). The researchers found that college students make little gain in critical-thinking skills, as measured by students’ scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment. This study has been criticized for relying too much on the CLA, but that overlooks a much more fundamental issue underscored by a growing body of research: we don’t know what critical thinking actually is, and we can’t be sure that it even exists.

Higher Ed's Biggest Gamble
Whether we can actually teach students critical-thinking skills is one of the most overlooked and misunderstood issues in higher education today, argues John Schlueter.

Two recent reports by a prominent researcher purport to challenge Academically Adrift's underlying conclusions about students' critical thinking gains in college, and especially the extent to which others have seized on those findings to suggest that too little learning takes place in college. The studies by the Council for Aid to Education show that students taking the Collegiate Learning Assessment made an average gain of 0.73 of a standard deviation in their critical thinking scores, significantly more than that found by the authors of Academically Adrift.

"The notion that college doesn't matter is inaccurate," Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education, said in an interview. (The council produces the CLA.) In the paper and a recent presentation of its data, Benjamin said that CAE's findings contrast with Academically Adrift's, though in the interview he sought to play down the extent to which his findings undermine those of the book.

Not much at all, one of the authors of Academically Adrift said in an e-mail message upon reviewing the CAE studies. Richard Arum, professor of sociology and education at New York University, noted methodological differences in how the two sets of data were drawn -- most significantly that the CAE study does not follow the same group of students over time -- and questioned the figures from Academically Adrift that Benjamin used to draw his conclusions.

He also took issue with the suggestion that his study, with the University of Virginia's Josipa Roksa, questioned the contribution that college makes to student learning ("Neither Roksa nor I have made such a claim," he wrote) -- although certainly some of the book's champions have done so.

Less Academically Adrift?
Challenging findings of landmark 2011 study, new data suggest that college students make significantly bigger gains in critical thinking. But differences in methodology may contribute to the differing conclusions.

While the question of the use of cross-sectional data versus longitudinal is certainly a relevant one with respect to the relationship between the two studies, if the overall question is whether there is a correlation between being college educated and lack of religion, then in spite of that methodological flaw, the CAE study would seem to support that correlation and thus imply that there is evidence that people who have graduated reject religion in greater numbers due to improved thinking skills. It supports the inference, though admittedly it's far from conclusive.

The idea that highly educated people are less religious, on average, than those with less education has been a part of the public discourse for decades, but some scholars of religion have called this notion into question. 1 And a new analysis of Pew Research Center surveys shows that the relationship between religion and education in the United States is not so simple.

On one hand, among U.S. adults overall, higher levels of education are linked with lower levels of religious commitment by some measures, such as belief in God, how often people pray and how important they say religion is to them. On the other hand, Americans with college degrees report attending religious services as often as Americans with less education.

Moreover, the majority of American adults (71%) identify as Christians. And among Christians, those with higher levels of education appear to be just as religious as those with less schooling, on average. In fact, highly educated Christians are more likely than less-educated Christians to say they are weekly churchgoers. 2

Looking at the U.S. public as a whole, however, the answer to the question of whether more education is correlated with less religion appears to be yes. Among all U.S. adults, college graduates are considerably less likely than those who have less education to say religion is “very important” in their lives: Fewer than half of college graduates (46%) say this, compared with nearly six-in-ten of those with no more than a high school education (58%).

Highly educated Americans also are less inclined than others to say they believe in God with absolute certainty and to pray on a daily basis. And, when asked about their religious identity, college graduates are more likely than others to describe themselves as atheists or agnostics (11% of college grads vs. 4% of U.S. adults with a high school education or less).

Pew Research Center || In America, Does More Education Equal Less Religion?

[Belacqua]

Highly educated Americans also are less inclined than others to say they believe in God with absolute certainty and to pray on a daily basis. And, when asked about their religious identity, college graduates are more likely than others to describe themselves as atheists or agnostics (11% of college grads vs. 4% of U.S. adults with a high school education or less).

Pew Research Center || In America, Does More Education Equal Less Religion?

Thank you, Jörmungandr. These look interesting. I'm looking forward to looking them up later and especially looking at the methodology.

I once saw a really badly designed study in which the researchers pre-selected a series of out-of-context sentences as meaningful or not. Then they had the test subjects rate the sentences, and declared that those who agreed with the researchers were good thinkers and those who disagreed were bad thinkers. It was kind of shocking. 

At any rate, people are complicated, and we are good at fooling ourselves. I think that when people leave home and get into a social situation (some colleges) where "critical thinker" becomes an image that gains social respect, and it's assumed that atheism will be the result of critical thinking, any number of people may become atheists for social reasons. And such motives would be very hard to discover in a survey, because of course respondents would self-describe as believing what they do because of critical thinking. 

People are funny. Simplistic explanations call for skepticism. In my opinion.