How long do you think it will be before religion is no longer a significant part of our culture?

[3Hotdogs]

Church attendance continues to dwindle. The number of people who profess to believe in some transcendental being continues to decline.

So, how long?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. Far longer than we will be alive.

Keep in mind that anyone in politics is obligated to profess religious affiliation. Being even agnostic, let alone atheist, is just not acceptable. Unfortunately.

[msongs]

3. not til after the rapture unfortunately

[PSPS]

4. It never will. It comes with being human.

That unique part of the human brain that gives us a sense of the future is what makes it impossible to comprehend an existence that just stops. As they say, "If there were no god, man would have invented him." Maybe you're thinking more of "churches." Those have been around forever too, in one form or another. What better way to control the masses than to inculcate them with the belief of an omnipresence that watches everything you do and rewards or punishes you "in the afterlife."

[Skittles]

9. nope

it comes with GROOMING

[Farmer-Rick]

18. My existence stops at the end of my fingers

I do not currently exist in France. My existence stops here where I live and interact with others.

So, for me, my existence ending or stopping is easy enough to imagine. It happens everywhere I am not.

Primitive humans may have needed a god because there was so much out of their control. But more technologically advanced civilization don't need a god anymore. Just like they don't need a king to tell them how to organize their civilization, we don't need an imaginary being to control us and blame.

God is more frequently invoked to force others to obey than it is to help others. It is a very toxic and manipulative concept today.

It will eventually die but unfortunately it is forced on all of us as children to keep us under control. And people are reluctant to give up ideas ingrained in childhood.

[qazplm135]

5. When we find a way to become immortal?

Death and the fear of death is always going to lead to some form of religion.

[Farmer-Rick]

19. I don't see that

I mean all those anti-vaxxers mostly were religious and they rushed at the chance to catch COVID even as their older relatives were dying around them.

All those churches were gathering and killing people during the shutdown of the pandemic.

No religion gives you a reason to die. Not a reason to live.

[qazplm135]

21. Pretty narrow frame

Not everyone who is religious is conservative, not everyone who is religious rejects science.

[Farmer-Rick]

22. You framed it I did not

Where did I write: everyone who is religious is conservative or everyone who is religious rejects science?

You said, "Death and the fear of death is always going to lead to some form of religion."

I gave you evidence that the fear of death does not always lead to religion. In fact in many cases death is promoted by religious people. That some religious people actually chase death and embrace it as god's will. Several of the people who died of COVID on their last breath recorded goodbyes that said they would do it all over again even knowing they would die because god's will. Even some preachers at the churches that had super spreader events said god's will. And they would be protected by Jesus's blood.

So, religion is really not merely about the fear of death otherwise why do religious people put themselves unnecessarily in the path of death when they could take simple precautions.

[qazplm135]

24. You didn't give evidence you gave

An opinion.

Death isn't promoted, life after death is promoted. If they didn't believe in life after death then death would be something to be feared. They get over that fear precisely because of a belief in an afterlife, and it's precisely that fear that generates the belief in an afterlife along with a greater force that transcends death...whether God or gods or reincarnation.

And people put themselves in danger usually due to ignorance not a death wish. They aren't hoping to die via virus, they are ignorant of the dangers of the virus or sucked in by conspiracy theories.

Which has little to do with religion writ large.

[Farmer-Rick]

25. I disagree

First I gave evidence. It may not be evidence enough for you, but you can not dismiss it as an opinion. Videos of dead religious people who failed to take minor precautions. That is evidence.

On the other hand, you gave opinions on what these dead religious people were thinking. You didn't even give evidence of their state of mind. You opined with no evidence on what they thought. You think you know their thoughts but the video evidence did not support your opinions.

I gave the recorded interviews of those who were about to die due to their inability to take minor precautions as evidence. You gave your opinion of what you thought they were thinking.

This fear of death and supposed life after death is what makes people imagine gods according to you. Is that what you think? I don't want to put words in your mouth. But you contradict yourself saying this imaginary life after death actually makes people chase death and causes more deaths than what Nature already provides for.

Through out the ages the religious have chased death. They commit suicide in mass like the Jim Jones and Heaven's Gates suicides. Then there are the atrocities of mass murder like the Christian Witch burnings, by different religious groups. If religion is caused by the fear of death, it seems to have backfired even according to you, because it seems to promote much more death.

[qazplm135]

26. Lol

You gave evidence that some people who happen to be religious are idiots or easily given to conspiracy theories about vaccines.

Not really earth shattering.

You've then advanced an opinion that this is really all due to religion seeking death. No evidence for that opinion.

I didn't say anything about chasing death. I said fear of death generates a need to avoid it by negating it as a finality. This isn't something I just came up with, it's a pretty long-standing psychological theory that predate you, me and our grandparents.

We created an afterlife almost as soon as we developed an understanding of the finality of death. We built up religions to help form and give logic and reason to an afterlife.

Obviously, those beliefs are used by others to do all sorts of things, control being primary. And certainly SOME people can use religion to justify anything from the heroic to the selfless to the massively stupid.

So because you think a handful of people express an opinion on death that somehow extends to all religious people or is the basis of all religious belief is a narrow and self serving opinion.

Religion does spring from a fundamental unanswerable question, what happens after we die. Fear of nonexistence. Even if I bought your opinion that religious people race to death, which obviously I don't, but even if I did, WHY would they be racing towards death UNLESS they believed that death wasn't the end?

There are precious few religions that don't have an afterlife, why is that?

You clearly don't think much about religion and thus you have created an opinion that allows you to handwave away all religious people as death seekers.

[Farmer-Rick]

28. Religions have a million and one ways of conning people

You have fallen victim to many of them.

There are so many false assumptions in your statement above that it would take me an hour just to list them all.

So, good luck with your theory and false assumptions. Hope they work out for you.

[qazplm135]

29. I'm agnostic lol

But sure lol

[Genki Hikari]

32. Agnostic isn't a belief position

It's not some halfway point between theism and atheism. You either have a belief in the existence of deities (theism), or you lack that belief (atheism).

A/gnosticism is a knowledge position about the existence of deities. You know they exist, or you lack that knowledge.

Most atheists are ALSO agnostics. They lack both knowledge and belief in the existence of deities.

Most theists are gnostics, but some are agnostic. You seem to fall into the latter category.

[qazplm135]

34. In spite of your

Atheist driven agnostics are really just atheists rant agnostics hear from people like you routinely, none of that is relevant to this discussion considering my response was to someone assuming I was religious.

Agnosticism is a belief that the answer is unknowable either way. It's the difference between an active belief that God does not exist and saying I don't know and no one else does either.

You may think that's not a distinction but a whole lot of people disagree with you.

Regardless it's not relevant to this discussion in the slightest.

[Genki Hikari]

33. We are NOT born with an idea of an afterlife

People are TAUGHT that concept.

I have never once wondered what happens after we die, for the same reason I don't wonder about where I was before I was born. I wasn't here (not born). Then I was. And then someday I won't be here anymore. There's more evidence that in death I'll go to the same place I was before I was born, which is nowhere extra-dimensional. We simply cease to be, and I've never had a problem with that. That's why I value my time on this planet so much.

He's a big-time idiot about some stuff, but I do agree with Richard Dawkins about what life and death are about:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

Accepting that one day we will cease to be, and that's all there is to it, is certainly better than the terroristic threat of eternal life. That would be horrifying, not something to look forward to. Abhorrence at the idea of eternal life is a common concept in Eastern thought, but few people in our culture have considered what it would entail (the movie Highlander sorta went into it--a rarity in our culture). It's because they can't wrap their minds around how long eternity would be. When anyone gives it serious thought, eternal life has no good outcomes.

And, once again, the believers of some religions DO seek death. It's the only way to get to that "life after death" part they're all so interested in. You can't get there without dying, you know.

[qazplm135]

36. So when you think about

What's after death and come up with nothing it's not a death wish but if others think about it and come up with something it is? Lol

That's not even remotely logical.

I said nothing about being born with a concept of an afterlife.
Try to stick to what I've actually said not some continued debate with someone else on some other topic.

I said that once we understand the concept of death, the next thought process is what happens after. Every kid asks the question because it's both obvious and rational.

You don't need a death wish to ask it. Nor do you need one to decide it's not final.

All you need is a normal sense of self preservation and a desire to continue.

Now, logic and evidence can certainly lead someone to ultimately decide the answer is nothing, death is final. If folks want to argue that belief in life after death has insufficient or even no evidence for it, that's absolutely fine. There's certainly a strong argument for that view.

Calling it a death wish is silliness.

[Genki Hikari]

31. Seriously?

You have to DIE to get to the supposed "life after death" part, so, yes, many of such people often promote and embrace death.

That's sort of the point.

[qazplm135]

35. Lol

No it isn't. Because almost every single religion explicitly makes suicide a sin and in some cases a sin that consigns you to hell.

Death is inevitable for all. Religion didn't make that up and postulating what happens after doesn't equate to a death wish simply because you "have to die" to get there.

[RockRaven]

6. It's not going away.

It's a subtype of magical thinking, which seems inevitable with humans as a sort of inherent quality, so even if religion were transiently eliminated in the population by happenstance, it would quickly re-start in some manner.

[Auggie]

12. +1

I can see people returning to religion as climate change begins to seriously screw with their lives.

[Farmer-Rick]

23. I don't see it coming back if we could stamp it all out

The reason it flourishes now is because children are indoctrinated with it at an early age. Why eles do we have majority Christians in the US, Hinduism in India and Buddhists in China.

It's hard to override childhood indoctrination into magical superstitions.

[PortTack]

7. Not soon enough!

[Skittles]

8. not soon enough

that's all I know

[Warpy]

10. Like a bad penny, it always seems to come back

but it does seem to wax and wane over the years, or at least religious lunacy does.

Religion was a far stronger force in the 1950s than it is now, it's just that religious lunacy is slowly coming off its peak. It does seem to peak when the calendar changes a century prefix. The reason we've lived through the current crop of pompadoured liars is that we changed a millennial prefix and that drove superstitious people completely around the bend and into the waiting con game infrastructure of the televangelists.

Religious loonies have always been out there, from holy rollers to backwoods snake handlers, but it wasn't until the 70s that their numbers were swelled by suburbanites seeking thrills and protection from yet another end of the world.

So we won't see it go away, it will just get a bit quieter as the calendar proceeds and the sky does not fall.

[joshdawg]

11. One can only hope, SOON!

I have another question: Why does a so-called non-religious group close a meeting with the lord's prayer and why do they celebrate christmas with gift-giving, tree, etc. ad nauseum?

[Farmer-Rick]

20. Christmas has become a secular holiday

All that crap about the war on Christmas is about putting that superstitious nonsense back into Christmas. The magical silly stuff with virgin births and moving stars for wise men. I like Christmas even though I'm an atheist because it's an excuse to get together with family and Not work.

I think there were winter celebrations throughout history. Religion used it to push their in own superstitiouns.

[Walleye]

13. The twelfth of never

[vanlassie]

14. I don't know, but we need to TAX churches NOW.

[3Hotdogs]

15. 9 grandkids.... 3 are adults. None of them go to church or even talk about religion.

[Cartoonist]

16. Since Trump is considered a god by some

The answer is never.

[rurallib]

17. there always seems to be a 35% that hang on to the old ways.

[BluesRunTheGame]

27. When the religious nuts finally blow everything up and no one is left.

[Genki Hikari]

30. Too long

I'm with Diderot about when we'll be through with it, but won't post the quote here. Knowing how certain members of a certain religion are around here, I'd get banned for it as hate speech or right-wing smears or a "personal attack."

[RussBLib]

37. within 10-20 years

BUT, this country will likely experience yet another religious revival at some point, as we have done multiple times in this country. It ebbs and flows, and we are in the ebbing part right now. Something stupid will happen and people will suddenly flock/flow to religion again. EVEN IF aliens finally reveal themselves to us, there will be many who will expand their cosmology to encompass extraterrestrial life. After all, this "god" created everything, right?

Still optimistic.

[Sessuch]

38. Stop sending money to televangelists and mega church "Pastors"

The religious message today in the US is "send money to buy your way to salvation. Remember the reformation.