We Are All Atheists Now
It’s inevitable. Religion is dead, saya a recent study.
Religion will soon be dead in nine countries according to a study reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas. Is this because the people in these countries are too smart for something like religion? No. The reason that religion is dead in those countries, they posit, is not they are strong minded. Religion will die in those countries because the people there cannot stand up to peer pressure. Being an atheist, they say, is cooler.
“The idea is pretty simple,” said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona.
“It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility.
“For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there’s some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not.”
Some of the census data the team used date from the 19th centuryDr Wiener continued: “In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.”
The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the “non-religious” category.
They found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them.
And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.
The world is junior high school, we just live in it.
It was unclear in the study how long it would be before we are all wearing baggy pants and messy hair.
It is also unclear how the study accounts for an almighty God who might have other ideas.