Disclaimer – this is a tongue and cheek remark from a Buddhist – Atheist..

That said, the end of religion has been predicted for many centuries, and people today are more preoccupied than ever by the increase of fundamentalism. Too bad the worlds population isn’t cooperating with this Diploma Mill juggling of statistics and biased perceptions.
To avoid any misunderstandings, I’m a non-church going religious person who believes in the separation of church and state.

That said, the end of religion has been predicted for many centuries, and people today are more preoccupied than ever by the increase of fundamentalism. Too bad the worlds population isn’t cooperating with this Diploma Mill juggling of statistics and biased perceptions.
To avoid any misunderstandings, I’m a non-church going religious person who believes in the separation of church and state.

But alas Aly religions are not meant to evolve. When you base a belief system on a loose collection of lies that defy logic, you can’t evolve and adapt. You must continue to play the game until the end. You are correct however in that “you can blame dogma and writing”. If the texts were not filled with heinous acts, death, and destruction by the prime Deity and if the stories had not been written so that those above the age of 8 could see through them, and finally if the organizations that supported them didn’t defy everything that their “Messiah” preached about in order to amass wealth and power here on earth (building elaborate churches, installing extensive audio/video systems, buying expensive vehicles and private jets for themselves, supporting hate groups and ideologies), perhaps people wouldn’t be running away from the evil of religion today.

Yes science says that a big man with a beard made a small nudge on some basic elements in order to begin a vast scientific process. My old testament must be missing some pages.

GOD is so powerful and knowledgeable. Too bad he didn’t have time to tell people to wash their hands before preparing food and performing medical procedures. Perhaps more of his children wouldn’t have had to suffer if he had.

So yes Louis there is no Santa Claus and the world would certainly be better without religion.

However I can say that is the cheeriest headline I have seen across the top of a story in months.

Perhaps someday we will throw off this shackle of ignorance.

Will the world be better off without religion?

Absolutely; History proves it over and over and over . . . .

I’m tired of all these religious nutjobs and their imaginary friends. It’s said that in a world where there is so much access to knowledge that idiots still believe in a virgin giving birth to a wizard who is his own father.

Religion is a disease, and we need a cure.

My generation (born 1920s and 30s) kept it quiet when we learnt to think for ourselves, usually in our teens, and often continued to go to church rather than shock or hurt our parents.

But I think some knowledge of the Bible, whether one believes or not, is a good thing. After all, the King James version is part of our heritage.

In New Zealand people can believe anything or nothing. It’s a free country.

Take a look at the birth rates of those who are islam and hindu and others then take a look at the birthrates of the non-religious. You will find that the growing multi-cultural, growing diversity, growing androgeny (feminist equality between the sexes)…are well below replacement…most are near 1.2 where replacement is 2.1.

It looks as if the secular western world including Japan are going extinct at the same time they are giving up their religion but you dont have the guts to publish that article.

Oh and by the way: PolPot, Moa, Stalin, Hitler, etc…were all atheists. The middle east dictators and former south american dictators who killed without pause were all atheists. Will the world really be better off without religion?

People have never believed in religious fantacies nearly as much as is popularly supposed: they were (and are) simply afraid to admit the truth, for millenia, as the mores of the times would have them killed or shunned or whatever the terrorist religionists were doing at the time.

No intelligent, thinking, independent person could believe in religion, as usually expressed – - i.e., some “supreme being” or “divine watchmaker” or other nonsense. It has always been a way for (usually) more educated tyrants to terrorize the uneducated, superstisious populace to grant them special priviledge and status, based solely on fear and ignorance.

Let’s don’t forget that ALL religions were founded at a time when the populace was illirerate and there was no supportive, logical, printed information available, even if anyone could read it. So people had to accept whatever the superstion-leaders, and or “Kings” decreed. Both were usually backed up with brute force, not logic. To demurr was cause for death: which path would you take? And then centuries of repetition appeared to give credence to such terroism. There’s really no other apt word for religion.

The so-called Bible was written hundrede of years after anyone was literate: what are the odds of hundreds of years of passing down myths and stories having any accuracy? And it was initially written in languages with no modern equivalents and arguable translations, then and now.

Nowadays, educated, literate, thinking people are more and more willing to admit they have been terrorized in one way or another all their lives and are willing to call a stop to it publically.

Accept the obvious: there is no God: there is no Heaven or Hell; there is no afterlife; there is no evidence of any of this. Only Nirvana awaits our death, and thank goodness for that!

There is hundreds of years of written evidence of a class of people willing and able to terrorize illiterate people for their own personal benefit and to justify a state. This is called “History”.

Most of it has been written by the very people imposing this terrorism – - usually because they were the only ones who could read and write, and were unscrupulous enough to realize their position of dominance and terror.

Also, I really like #41 comment.

I suspect those who actually seek out the evidence to scientific theories and laws to demonstrate their validity (to themselves or the community of man) are few in number, outside the scientific community.

What will (most likely) happen is new religions based on modern society will begin to show up, as people seek comfort in authority and want an easy to digest guide to life. Even in academia the spirit behind the revolution during the Enlightenment (1641-1781) is already dead or dying. The quest to find rationality in everything, accept nothing until demonstrated is already gone in philosophy (the projects of Rationalism, Idealism and Phenomenology have all fallen to empiricist skepticism or postmodernism, and nothing is here to take their place).

Positivism with its self-refuting incoherence is here to stay because quite frankly, very few care anymore. Cartesian doubt, Hume’s skepticism and the fall of logical positivism are issues nobody cares about anymore. When academia no longer cares, you can be sure the masses definitely do not care, and while intellectuals, mathematicians and scientists know their fields are valid, the masses won’t and will always be easily fooled and duped by good rhetoric.

No, religion is not dead, we are simply realizing “God is dead” but will quickly erect new gods soon. Humanity is still just an ape in his cave, staring at the shadows on the wall.

http://www.amazon.com/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448

It was written by a secular guy and praised by Razib Khan

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/10/the-wheel-of-history-turns-to-the-gods/

Food for thought

http://www.real-privacy.it.tc

Nietzsche said that God was dead. But it is Nietzsche who is dead and God has a very good health. Judge by yourself:

In 1960, the percentage of people in the world who believed in God was 50%. Now it is 66%. It is expected that it will be 75% in 2050.

Of course, Europe and (to some extent) North America are experiencing a secularization process (more apparent than real: even in the secularized Northern Europe the percentage of people who believe in God is a majority, although traditional church attendance is in steep decline).

But the rest of the world makes up for this loss.

If you want to see a fascinating statistical study about the secularization in Western countries that will defy your preconceptions (whether you are religious or secular), see this

http://www.religionomics.com/asrec/ASREC09_Papers/Franck%20&%20Iannaccone%20ASREC%202009.pdf

If religion is being out competed by secular beliefs, you can blame dogma and writing, which are forcing the religions to stay the same when they were meant to evolve and adapt with their adherents.

While science knows nothing about what happened prior to the existence of the universe, we do know that what initially “came out” was a fully “wound up” minimum entropy universe, where order, information and usable energy was at its maximum. We also know that the universe, and everything in it, is now running down towards heat death and entropy death. And will reach a final cosmic state when disorder, loss of information and loss of usable energy is at a maximum. In the end there won’t even be enough usable energy left for the atheists to do their shoe laces up, let alone wind the universe back up again.

All of which tells us that the universe is dependent and not “self-existing” or “self-sustaining”, and thus necessitates a “cause” outside the universe. And a big juicy Nobel prize awaits anyone who discovers anything in the universe that IS self-existing and not dependent on something preceding.

All of which means that the pantheistic cosmic god of atheism and Darwinism is dependent and dying, and therefore could not have brought itself into existence.

So, what are the causal options. Was the source of the cosmos self-existing or likewise dependent on something preceding.

Option 1: If the source of the cosmos was not self-existing, but infinitely dependent on something preceding, we would have an infinite dependent regress forever, where “nothing” was ever capable of bringing itself into existence, not ever. In which case nothing would exist, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Option 2: Another alternative would be that absolutely nothing existed, and that absolutely nothing brought something (the universe, multiple universes or a bubble of universes) into existence. And at the transition point of going from non-existence to existence the universe would have been both nothing and something at the same time. This option is absurd and breaks the first law of logic, the law of non-contradiction.

Option 3: A third alternative would be that the source of the universe was outside space and time and therefore existing in and of itself. In which case the infinite “cause-effect” dependency regress would not apply. This would mean that the source of the universe would be uncaused and self-existing, and not dependent on something preceding. Thus, we have a philosophical and scientific basis for existence, and you and I can continue having this conversation.

The term theists use to describe this “necessary” self-existing non-dependent first cause is GOD. And no alternative ever presented has offered a better explanation or basis for existence.

Of course, Hawking and his fellow minded atheists think God and religion is not needed, and that gravity or other phenomena brought it all into existence. But this too turns out to more imagined than real – a delusion. For how did gravity or any other phenomena come into existence.

This brings us to the age old question, which came first, the chicken or the egg, the bee or the flower. The answer to this question is neither. They are all dependent on a preceding cause, just like our dependent dying universe. All of which means that religion and God will be around for a very long time, in spite of questionable scientific surveys, and endless fluctuations in cultural beliefs.

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People don’t need religion to have good morals, just like your pet dog doesn’t need religious morals to NOT kill and eat you.

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Hurry Up Zero Percent !!!

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I just don’t understand how the idea of religion is ‘sacred’ (pun intended, sorry) in modern times. Religion was simply the first step towards science. It was primitive man attempting to make sense out of his environment. Eventually man grew to understand that the sun is not pulled across the sky (etc). Now, we should be able to move on and say all those other ideas don’t need an invisible flying spaghetti monster (google it if you don’t know the reference) to explain things.

Removing religion doesn’t, by the way, remove or dilute the concept of morality, it simply places the matter on us rather than a mysterious unknowable figure.

As for evolution, the mistake usually made is to think of the current forms as the ‘goal’ of the process instead of being a step in an ongoing process. An apple tree wasn’t the goal of evolution a plant that grew apples filled or exploited a niche in the environment and thrived. Someday it will probably lead to something other form of tree.

Final comment is: the concept of something ‘higher’, no, something ‘overseeing’ may be comforting to some, but it’s certainly not necessary or even indicated in any way.