I think I need to demonstrate this graphically. Obviously not accurate but demonstrating the point. The point in me saying the change has been non-linear is to show that the fact that decreasing religiousness by X% took hundreds upon hundreds of years doesn't suggest that it will take hundreds of years to decrease it all the way to 0. Your conclusion is completely non-sequitur - by all means argue that religion won't fade for hundreds of years, but give me something other than "well it took that long to get this far"
"Your point is non-sequitur. Here's a graph with no statistical basis whatsoever and is based on my own experiences and observations, which I have criticized you for using in your arguments."
I'm referencing sociological and psychological behavior of humans and the common trends of change in the past to determine that religion's decline, should it continue to decline, will be slow, which is why I'm saying it'll take centuries for religion to decline to a point that it would disappear, if it would continue to decline. So, yes, I am saying that I believe a decline of religion to extinction is going to be slow, and my belief is based on the behavior of human beings in the past and their adversity to change. If we assume that religion will keep declining, I'm also saying that I find such a scenario, if it were to occur, to be very unlikely.
I'm pretty sure the entire point is that people will stop believing.
But there's no way to determine that they'll stop. Religion cannot disappear unless the people who believe it disappear, and even if 99.99% of a single generation is non-religious in some form, the 00.01% of people who do believe it means that it still exists. Each generation is going to have religious people, because there will be families that raise their children on religion, and those children will ascribe to it, and teach their children, repeat, repeat. Additionally, for religion to truly disappear, everyone has to stop believing it, and nobody must practice it until the very memory of religion itself fades away. Either that, or all humans have to die and the species must restart without forming religion. Both of these scenarios do seem unlikely to me, yes. Although I'd place more money on full extinction of humans killing off religion more than gradual societal change.
No. You don't need to convince the older generations. For Christ's sake, this won't happen tomorrow. What I'm positing, to put it bluntly, is that this will happen when those people are dead. Nobody here is speaking short-term. We're not plucking it off, it's smoothly sliding out and has been for a while now. A passing Google search shows this happening. It will keep going that way until the religiousness of our societies is negligible. I'm not sure how you can visualise anything else happening. I didn't say it'd happen overnight. Nice and silky smooth, following the exact same trend as over the past 100 years or so. We won't suddenly see a generation of pure atheists. We'll see a slightly less religious generation, and then an even less religious generation. You know, pretty much exactly what we're seeing right now if you look back over the past few generations.
But less religious people in each generation =/= religion dying out and fading away. Like I said, people will always believe it, and as long as people believe it and practice it, it won't disappear. And again, this is a scenario in which we assume people will continuously become less religious. Sure, we've definitely declined in between the 1600s and now, but there are more factors than just "will religion as a single entity continue declining?" Are we to assume all religions will decline at the same rate? Will people not create any new religions? Will there never be an increase in the prominence a specific religion? Are religious believers going to never take any actions to increase the belief in their religion (whatever those actions may be is not something I'm focusing on with this point)? Are all countries going to decline at the same rate? Are all countries even going to decline at all? There's too many factors to just look at a gradual decline in Western countries and apply it to the entire human species.
These supposedly rare countries which aren't dominated by religion are a lot more common than you seem to think. As far as first world countries go, I'd say most are probably less religious than the US. There's an interesting Wikipedia page on it (take reliability as you will):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_country
According to that slightly older survey, 69% of Americans said religion was important. Canada, 42%. Australia, 32%. United Kingdom, 27%. Obviously a lot of countries are more religious, but we're talking about western societies in this thread. It's not "religion is everywhere (with some exceptions)", it's "religion isn't everywhere (with some exceptions)". This is why you're projecting your own experience.
I'm sorry, when did we establish that we were only talking about Western countries? I never said that. Don't think you said that either. :v
If we divide the countries into two categories - "prominent religion" and "no prominent religion" - and base it on the percentages - "Yes, important" vs. "No, unimportant" - and we determine a countries category based on which percentage is higher - "Yes, important" higher = "prominent religion," "No, unimportant" higher = "no prominent religion" - then the number of countries in "prominent religion" is 114 and then number of countries in "no prominent religion" is 35.
Even with that extremely narrow categorization, it should be noted that no country has a "Yes, important" percentage of 0%. The lowest is Estonia at 16%. So, no, it actually
is "religion is everywhere (with some exceptions)" if we are going by this study's results. In fact, if I changed my statement to "religion exists everywhere," then I wouldn't even need the (with some exceptions) because it does, in fact, exist everywhere. Whether it is prominent or not is a different category, and whether or not that country has a large presence of religion in a country is also something different, because a society as a whole doesn't need to have a lot of religious people for their to still be religion in a government. When the percentages get closer together, I'd wager that a lot more religion gets into government.
If you can get on my case for taking your use of the word "everywhere" literally, you don't then get to do the exact same thing to my use of the word "forever". I'm not going to type out "forever except maybe not in a long long long time" every time I want to demonstrate the point. Just envision that beside it whenever I use the term (which is exactly what you advised me to do with your use of "everywhere".
If that's how your use of forever is to be interpreted, then yeah, I'll def. interpret it like that. Thanks for clarifying (which is exactly what I did for you :v).
This is a critical misunderstanding of my points and it's beginning to grate, honestly. We don't need to convince anyone. If the witch-burners were alive right now, they'd still want to burn witches. But luckily, nobody had to convince them all to stop murdering women because that's not how old ideas are phased out. Old ideas have never been phased out that way. You're arguing against a point nobody is making.
I'm showing you a trend. This trend is forming. This trend is undeniable. Religiousness is on the decline and it will continue to decline. Those are numbers, whether Bob the priest in Texas suddenly becomes an atheist tomorrow or not. I don't see what about this is debatable. I'm not saying everyone will stop being religious. I'm saying it will fade from our culture. Which it will, just like witch burning.
Well actually the Salem Witch Trials ended because the governor's wife was accused of being a witch and he outlawed them because of that (allegedly - grain of salt). The court even stopped accepting spectral evidence before it ended. The witch burners didn't need to die for witch burning to disappear.
And convincing someone not to burn witches is different from convincing someone to not believe in their religion. Take spectral evidence. Cotton Mather's wrote a book that said the evidence was presumptive, and other people were like, "yeah, actually there's no real evidence there since it's just people accusing others and that can be faked, so maybe we shouldn't use spectral evidence." Since most of the convictions were based on spectral evidence, the number of accusations went down significantly. People saw that there was no evidence, so they stopped. But if someone's like, "hey, God isn't real because his existence is presumptive," then a religious person is probably not going to believe that because they have the Bible, which is touted as evidence of God by religious people, and most people will also cite experiences they've had in which they've interacted with God. How do you argue against that with someone? All you can say is, "that wasn't God," and believe me, they won't believe that. They'll believe that the Bible and their experiences are evidence, and you won't be able to convince them otherwise (maybe in some exceptions with the less religiously devoted but you get the point).
I agree that religion has declined, which is a trend, but I don't necessarily agree that it will continue declining - in fact, I have no idea what it will do. It could gradually start increasing, or it could level out for a while, or it could drop or rise sharply. Who knows? I don't necessarily disagree that its prominence won't decline more, but I don't believe it'll be gone for several more centuries, and even then, whether or not it will be gone is impossible to determine now. However, based on what I do know about religious people, both from my anecdotal experiences with them and from my studying on psychological behavior and sociological trends, it's going to be a very unlikely scenario.
You are doing exactly what I'm doing - citing past trends and behaviors to attempt to speculate about the future - and that's fine, but since you've criticized me for it, I'm going to call that out :v You've cited no actual numbers that truly support your claim. You've simply said "there is a trend in which religion has been declining," which is true, but you've cited no evidence that it will continue declining. You've simply said, "this trend will continue," which may or may not be true. But don't feel the need to cite it, because I'm gonna clarify that what
I'm arguing isn't that religiosity is going to increase (because I don't know if it will) or that it'll stop decreasing. I'm arguing that humans outliving religion seems extremely unlikely given the behaviors of religious people and how devoted they are to their faith, and because there are still going to be enough people in each generation to keep religion alive, regardless of how irreligious a specific generation is.
