Layman

Is Atheism dying out?

Between 1991 and 1999, the world' population rose by around 600,000,000. That's a growth rate of about 12%.

In the same time period, however, the world's atheist population plummeted from 240 million to 150 million. That's a drop of more than 45%.

Most skeptics I know think they are gaining ground, not losing it.

Why the massive loss of ground?

Sources:

1994 World Almanac and 2001 World Almanac.

[ February 23, 2002: Message edited by: Layman ]</p>

BigBlue2

Not in Australia, it isn't. The non-religious population downunder jumped from just over 12% in 1991 to 16.6% in 1996.

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics

pug846

What are the numbers for the western world layman? Forced atheism is dying out - not atheism "by choice."

kwigibo

i think something may have happened around 1991 in eastern Europe, and i think that has something to do with it.

Maverick

Moving from SL&S to MRD.

Maverick

joedad

Excellent point.

I also think Layman's point is that status quo theism proves something.

Interesting.

joe

Malaclypse the Younger

I'd like to see a breakdown of the numbers by country and varieties of religious/nonreligious belief.

[ February 24, 2002: Message edited by: Malaclypse the Younger ]</p>

xoc

Excellent point joedad. There are certainly some interesting statistics about the world-wide rise of Islam and the number of Muslims in the world, but these statistics seldom take into account those nations that have a death penalty for apostates, which at least reveals the difficulty one has when gaining meaning from stats.

RyanS2

I would like to see the statistics. Here in the U.S., the last statistical study I saw showed it gained quite a bit. (2000) Conversely, what do we consider "atheist?"

"from 240 million to 150 million."

This is a curiousity to me, because in America, there's only around 25-30 million atheists. America is a pretty large country. Where do these other 210 million atheists come from? For instance, atheism in Russia. Christian missionaries are in there quite a bit now, and Russia would now have less atheists. Without a statistical breakdown, it'd be hard to give an opinion on this.

Vorkosigan

We went over this in a very long thread a while back. Most of the figures on atheism are bogus to begin with, for various reasons. There were simply never that many atheists in Russia under the Communists, nor are there many in China (proportionately more people practice religion in China than in the US, according to the gov't of China) and in Vietnam now. 100 million people don't suddenly switch to becoming believers in a decade, rather, 100 million believers had the opportunity to publicly and safely state that they believed.

And yes, atheism is slowly growing. Considering that 300 years ago there were hardly any atheists in the west, looking at the case now, I remain optimistic that someday religion and its evils will be the province of a pitied minority, at least in our part of the world.

In any case, the figure of 150 million atheists is absurd. In Japan alone there are something like 100 million people who do not believe in any gods. Adding the 6% or 7% of Chinese who don't believe in gods either, gives us something like 160-180 million atheists in those two countries alone. And that's not counting western Europe, the US, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand.......

Michael