joedad

Theism seems like the companion of free gods, and atheism the companion of free men.

Despite any number of possible intervening "dark ages," atheism appears to me to be an ultimate inevitability. This must surely scare the hell out of some people.

Unless average human intelligence worldwide begins to diminish, and continues to diminish in the long term, I give atheism a very high probability of becoming not only acceptable, but desirable.

joe

MassAtheist

<a href="http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html" target="_blank">This page</a> states that there are approximately 850 million "Secular/nonreligious/agnostic/atheist" people in the world based on self-identification.

The rest of that site contains lots and lots of stats. Another page shows a 110% increase in nonreligious/secular people in the US between 1990 and 2000.

Logically, I have to believe that as the scientific community is able to explain more and more about the universe, religion will slowly give way to knowledge. I don't believe that religion will ever go away completely, however. There is too much power at stake.

James AD

Not to mention money from the collection baskets.

Echo

I've noticed in my own personal experience (not quoting any stats here) that fewer people seem to be calling themselves "atheists" and more are calling themselves "agnostics" or simply "nonreligious." Perhaps that has something to do with the decrease that Layman is talking about.

ohwilleke

My experience is that the traditionally favored agnostic is giving way to atheist, but that labels like "nonreligious", "spirtual but not religious", and "secular" are also swallowing up much of the agnostic identification

Toto

Some atheist groups, like <a href="http://www.atheistsunited.org" target="_blank">Atheists United</a> have experienced an increase in membership since 9-11. With the increase in god-talk coming from the government, closet atheists have realized they have to speak up.

But there are still a lot of people afraid of the word "atheist". They call themselves "non-religious" or "secular" or list themselves as members of the church they grew up in, although they don't believe anything they learned there. If they knew the meaning of "agnostic", they might call themselves agnostic.

There are also a lot of people who take the stance that the question of whether god exists is not important to them. (I know an Episcopal priest who claims with regret that his entire congregation is like that.) I don't know what you would call these people. Ignostics? Clearly if you don't think it's important whether God exists, you have already ruled out the conventional Christian and Muslim God(s).

xoc

This might explain the continuation of "preachers" (not that I think it does) but it does nothing to explain the 250 people in the congregation who are filling the baskets.

There seems to be a misconception floating around here that "people really wish they wuz atheist, they are jist too ignorint." The whole point about the apparent change of religious views after USSR Communism should disprove that well enough. Religion is not "popular" because of temporal limits of science; it often appeals to the "existential" problems and senses that follow a different kind of thinking/knowing than empirical studies. There is a void between the two which is continual; science cannot give morality for example. Very few people are "religious/spiritual" because they think that science has failed in it's endeavour to explain the physical world. It just can't touch the abstract or impute values because these are things simply beyond what can be grappled with physically. This is the dilemna that led Einstein to postulate: "Religion without science is blind; science without religion is lame." He deduced that because of the fundamental inability of "science" to prescribe a moral order. but (I note) even after the fact "morals, individuals, community" etc. remain neccesary if concepts not derived from the material base.

[ February 26, 2002: Message edited by: xoc ]</p>

Boro Nut

No. That's extinction. Atheism is when you can distinguish the subtle difference between JRR Tolkien's epic books, and his autobiography.

Boro Nut

kwigibo

The term i like to use is 'apatheist', it really describes almost everyone i know.

britinusa

Exactly, and this is one of the reasons why I'm apparently more optimistic than some of my fellow atheists about the future.
As for the past, I think the 20th century was very frustrating for atheist activists. Aided by the great scientific advances of the 19th and early 20th centuries, we had the theists on the run (at least in the west), but the rise of communism really hurt us. Too many people equated "communist" with "atheist".
In the short term, the Millennium nonsense and the 9/11 attack, for example, checked our progress. Blips like this will continue to occur, but in the long run the seemingly huge theist/atheist gap will diminish.
Returning to the "apatheists", a recent survey commisioned by the Church of England showed that 75% of the UK population consider themselves xians (I believe its higher in the U.S.), but this is a very soft 75%. Only 7.5% attend church on an average Sunday, and at least half of those are elderly. In nearly 15 years of going to work (the last two in the USA), the many thousands of hours I've spent in pubs or hanging out with friends, I've never taken part in or even heard a conversation about religion. The vast majority of people just don't care about it. For me, apatheists are in the "non-religious" category. If I was an apatheist and someone asked me what was my xian denomination, I would say catholic, simply because I attended catholic schools. Another example "well, my parents are Presbyterians, and I went to church with them a few times when I was a kid, so I guess I'm a Presbyterian." And she'll never think about religion again for the rest of her life, but she'll be included in the "xian" column on the opinion pollster's sheet.
Also, there's the "closet factor". If you are in a crowded shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon and some opinion pollster asks you "do you believe in god?" I'll bet some of the atheists on these forums will reply "er... yeah, of course".
If an honest opinion poll could be conducted among those people who think about, debate and study religion, it wouldn't surprise me if WE were the majority.