Look what happend in Ireland..When will the decrease of Religion of this big magnitude come to America (mythology, agnostics)
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More good news....A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.
The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation. Those countries are Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. BBC News - Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says
Hi Sanspeur.
Yes, that is good news. Thanks for sharing. Hopefully this kind of news will keep on coming for years.
Reality, Critical thinking and Reason will hopefully triumph over superstition and fairy tales about "Sky Daddy"....
It looks to be partly a mathematical theory not real proof of anything.
I'm fairly confident empathy, intuition, need for meaning, objective morals, Truth, etc will survive reductionism, scientism, and revisionist history. They have so far. Religion was supposed to be dead by 1960, 2000, etc. We still have "testimonial Christian" parties in places like the Netherlands and Religious writing awards in Sweden.
That being said sure there are some worrisome trends. Thankfully Western Europe and Japan aren't the entire world. So the age of demographic winter, increased suicide rates, and revival of eugenics might not come after all. (Do I really associate atheism to all this? Maybe a little, but not that much. It's more if you're going to state these ridiculously triumphalist views of irreligions increase I get to do ridiculous nightmare scenarios. Most people largely do what they think sounds best religion or no.)
Well regarding Spain, even though most peple dont go to church there and it has gay marriages, it is still a culturally catholic country. Spain is still conservative regarding European standards.
Do you really think it is so different in Ireland? To me, it seems very similar. Ireland is also kind of Conservative by European standards and the people are also culturally Catholic, even if the church itself has suffered a backlash. I don't see a very strong difference here.
It looks to be partly a mathematical theory not real proof of anything.
I'm fairly confident empathy, intuition, need for meaning, objective morals, Truth, etc will survive reductionism, scientism, and revisionist history. They have so far. Religion was supposed to be dead by 1960, 2000, etc. We still have "testimonial Christian" parties in places like the Netherlands and Religious writing awards in Sweden.
That being said sure there are some worrisome trends. Thankfully Western Europe and Japan aren't the entire world. So the age of demographic winter, increased suicide rates, and revival of eugenics might not come after all. (Do I really associate atheism to all this? Maybe a little, but not that much. It's more if you're going to state these ridiculously triumphalist views of irreligions increase I get to do ridiculous nightmare scenarios. Most people largely do what they think sounds best religion or no.)
The end of religion is not a worrisome trend.
It's something to be jubilant about. That will teach some people (hopefully) to keep their religious beliefs out of our laws and off of our bodies.
Our last census in Ireland was also quite promising. There was noticeable increases in "No religion" and "Atheist" being selected.
But what is even more interesting is that informal studies done by others, and by Atheist Ireland, suggest that many people who put themselves down as "Catholic" were of the older generations soon to die out. And even then many admitted things like "I only put that down because that is what I have always put down".
If that is as prevalent an attitude as our informal queries _suggest_ it may be then the next two census counts should show even more marked declines in religiosity in Ireland as the "census traditionalists" die off a bit. No certainty there of course but the future looks promising for us and I look forward to seeing the future counts myself.
I doubt that it will happen as rapidly in America as it did in Ireland. Ireland was overwhelmingly a country whose citizens were mostly Catholic.* When the truth about the Catholic Church came out I think it turned a lot of people off and that's all it took. Here in the U.S., we have half a million denominations of Protestants, we have Catholics, and just about everything else on the fringe and in-between. So, for example, when a bunch of evangelical ministers who speak out against gay people are found out to be homosexual themselves (usually from some embarrassing situation too - like giving hand jobs in the stall of a meth-riddled truck stop) the parishioners just jump ship to the next closest thing. I suspect that in Ireland there wasn't as much diversity as there is in the U.S. so when the Catholic Church collapsed so did A LOT of people's faith.
*Although, I am reminded of the atheist journalist traveling through Northern Ireland when the conflict with England was very intense. Stopped at a checkpoint, he was asked what religion he was. He replied "Atheist." The man at the checkpoint responded "Protestant Atheist or Catholic Atheist?"
Do you really think it is so different in Ireland? To me, it seems very similar. Ireland is also kind of Conservative by European standards and the people are also culturally Catholic, even if the church itself has suffered a backlash. I don't see a very strong difference here.
Yes Ireland is similar to Spain in regards to it being culturally Catholic. Infact they are still considerd Catholic Countries and most people stil ideintify themselves as Catholics. The link further describes this. http://researchrepository.ucd.ie/bit...pdf?sequence=1
For you no, but most of the world's people are not militantly irreligious. I don't even really desire the end to religions I don't believe in. I doubt I desire the end to all atheistic philosophies either as such.
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Originally Posted by chielgirl
That will teach some people (hopefully) to keep their religious beliefs out of our laws and off of our bodies.
Irreligious or non-theist ideologies can do those things too. Secular Sweden sterilized more people than maybe any European land outside Nazi Germany. China had forced abortion.
When adjusted for inequality Costa Rica was the happiest nation on Earth. It's far from the least religious. True irreligious Scandinavia is also high, but France and Japan were both below quite religious Paraguay and Cyprus.
Gallup showed a correlation between religion and generosity. And not just in the "well they give to greedy churches" way either, in the "they help strangers in need" way too.
For many people religions have provided the social supports they needed to break free of addictions or personal failings. Before his conversion Joseph Pearce was a white-nationalist arrested for inciting racial hatred.
Irreligious or non-theist ideologies can do those things too. Secular Sweden sterilized more people than maybe any European land outside Nazi Germany.
Hardly. Yes, eugenics was practiced in Sweden. It was also practiced in the United States.
Approximately 63,000 people mostly women were sterilized in Sweden from 1935 to 1975. In 1999, Sweden agreed to compensate the victims of forced sterilization, offering each individual up to 175,000 kronor. The 1972 law which forced transgendered people to be sterilized was still on the books and there were people who were forcibly sterilized.
Currently sixteen countries require some form of sterilization before they undergo gender reassignment surgery (Belgium, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Monaco, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia. Denmark, the Netherlands, and Portugal are currently reviewing their legal requirements.
Sweden's law was just overturned in December of 2012 and is now off the books which ends all forced sterilization in Sweden. It should not have taken this long, but it is a step forward.
Note that in North Carolina, social workers had the power to designate people for forced sterilization if they had low IQs.
A proponent of birth control in all forms, Mr. Kuralt used the program extensively when he was director of the Mecklenburg County welfare department from 1945 to 1972. That county had more sterilizations than any other in the state.
Over all, about 70 percent of the North Carolina operations took place after 1945, and many of them were on poor young women and racial minorities. Nonwhite minorities made up about 40 percent of those sterilized, and girls and women about 85 percent.
The program, while not specifically devised to target racial minorities, affected black Americans disproportionately because they were more often poor and uneducated and from large rural families.
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Before most of the programs were closed down, more than 60,000 people nationwide had been sterilized by state order.
In short, eugenics was the province of the elite who actually believed in the Nazi idea that racial purity was a good thing. Charles Lindbergh was one of those people.
Thanks for the clip. It is likely that some are giving up religion as such and others are just giving up on the churches. That's fine with me. If people want to believe in a god of some sort, that's their choice, but churches that seem to think that they have some religious mandate to tell us the way we should live are a nuisance.
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