is the latest "great awakening" falling into a coma?
The Edge magazine article “Why the gods are not winning” by Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman (h/t: Daylight Atheism) examines arguments from some articles in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and Commonweal. Paul and Zuckerman cite some overlooked information from the World Christian Encyclopedia:
The number of nonreligionists…. throughout the 20th century has skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900, to 697 million in 1970, and on to 918 million in AD 2000…. Equally startling has been the meteoritic growth of secularism…. Two immense quasi-religious systems have emerged at the expense of the world's religions: agnosticism…. and atheism…. From a miniscule presence in 1900, a mere 0.2% of the globe, these systems…. are today expanding at the extraordinary rate of 8.5 million new converts each year, and are likely to reach one billion adherents soon.
Amid the article’s numerous typos, the authors speak of “a great polarization” occurring “as increasingly anxious and often desperate hard-core believers mount a vigorous counterrevolution via extreme levels of activism to the first emergence of mass apostasy in history.” Their summation is that, in general, a country’s spirituality:
…is actually the result of social, political and especially economic conditions (please note we are discussing large scale, long term population trends, not individual cases). Mass rejection of the gods invariably blossoms in the context of the equally distributed prosperity and education found in almost all 1st world democracies. There are no exceptions on a national basis.
US exceptionalism in this regard is due to our “substandard socio-economic conditions and the highest level of [economic] disparity.” The authors observe that:
Every time a nation becomes truly advanced in terms of democratic, egalitarian education and prosperity it loses the faith. It's guaranteed. That is why perceptive theists are justifiably scared. In practical terms their only practical hope is for nations to continue to suffer from socio-economic disparity, poverty and maleducation. That strategy is, of course, neither credible nor desirable. And that is why the secular community should be more encouraged.
This rhetorical Q&A is particularly succinct:
Assuming America continues to secularize towards the 1st world norm then what can we expect? The decline in faith-based conservative ideology is predicted to allow the country to adopt the progressive policies that have been proven to work in the rest of the west, and vice-versa.
One wonders if the current “great awakening”—as theists like to call the intellectual somnolence of blind faith—is in fact a great coma.
Quote of the Day:
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." (Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)