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religion is slowly dying?
- Thread starter scanz0r
- Start date
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
It's getting or has gotten to the point where advances in science impact on many religions to where it will have to adjust accordingly to scientific findings and discoveries or simply become obsolete. Fundamental religions stand the most to lose, whereas progressive religions
will adjust but lose it's traditional foundations. Religion will still be around imo as long as there are unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries.
will adjust but lose it's traditional foundations. Religion will still be around imo as long as there are unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries.
JustCallMeNick
Member
I can't remember where i read this, or perhaps heard it.. but i've heard/read that religions are slowl declining in favour of science.. would you say this is true? in 200 years from now might there be no religion ? your opinionI'm not sure, so I have no answer I guess..
I think non-believers would like this to be true, although I'm not sure it is. I think it depends on the region of the world. In the West, yes religion (especially traditional, Abrahamic religion) is declining. In Africa, Asia, and South America, though, I think religion is picking up speed.
As society progresses, I think religion will change but probably not go away entirely, especially not in just 200 years. Religion will change and adapt and become more nuanced and compatible with science and progressive/democratic values. But be gone altogether? I doubt it.
I think the religions that go against science are slowly dying. Very slowly. However, a lot of religions can go hand and hand with science (even if they're vastly less populous religions). These will be just fine. Humanity is predisposed towards mystical thought, and benefit from it in evolutionarily understandable ways.
Considering sciences are an outgrowth of the religious impetus - the search for truths and meaning - and considering sciences and religions have no intrinsic conflict, no.
I think old traditional religions will continue decline but new religious-type thinking will increase. It's happening now in the west.
I can't remember where i read this, or perhaps heard it.. but i've heard/read that religions are slowl declining in favour of science.. would you say this is true? in 200 years from now might there be no religion ? your opinion
Science can't possibly be a problem for any conceptions of religion worth keeping.
It does however look like there are quite a lot of not-quite-together conceptions of religion needing to be brushed out and renewed around there.
So, depending on what one wants to understand religion to be, religion is either headed towards an exciting, much-needed renewal or towards an unavoidable extinction. For most people it will be somewhere in between.
It is however very clear that the dogmatic, superstitious approach towards religion is inherently unable to survive, and undeserving to.
JustCallMeNick
Member
You find this...funny?
It's Ya Girl Jesus' Wife
Evangelist
Jesus will return before 200 years.... The world will be over. Religion is not dying and it will never die. Christianity has survived 2000 years. It's not going anywhere. People will always believe in God because He is constantly revealing Himself to those who earnestly seek Him. God is very real, more real than us.
JESUS IS LORD.
JESUS IS LORD.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
I agree yet it's unavoidable that philosophical nuances can and do arise from scientific findings and discoveries.
Much of it relegated to cable tv these days.
MD
qualiaphile
Yea, you ever watch the show Futurama. Half the jokes are made when people say 'because of SCIENCE'. Saying you believe in science is like saying you believe in a house. The scientific process and achievement and innovation are all products of human beings who are working tirelessly and building upon each other's knowledge, not because science is some magical field where all the answers come up.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
If I was Christian, I would have said that too.
psychoslice
Veteran Member
I think its great that some of religion is dying , it needs to be relevant for today and not for the past that was full of ignorance and superstations, out of its death I think a more personal religion will arise, we will find our own inner being, or own connection to the Cosmos, the word god will be no longer needed, for it only kept us away from ever discovering our own inner connection. This realization is already happening throughout the world, to me its the second coming of the Christ Consciousness.
JustCallMeNick
Member
Who says that?
I can't remember where i read this, or perhaps heard it.. but i've heard/read that religions are slowl declining in favour of science.. would you say this is true? in 200 years from now might there be no religion ? your opinion
This is the secularization thesis by which "the belief that as societies progress, particularly through modernization and rationalization, religion loses its authority in all aspects of social life and governance."
As Liberalism has grown over the past two or three centuries, so societies have become more secular, with legal recognition of the separation of church and state and a wider acceptance of the idea that religion is a private rather than a public or political concern. The advance of scientific knowledge has helped increase our understanding of the universe, but we are really struggling with moral knowledge about the nature of man.
Right now our society is having problems with the very concept of progress. the twentieth century threw up some really unexpected surprises (two world wars, the great depression, the horrors of communism and Nazism/fascism, and the near collapse of liberal-democratic systems in the thirties), and so it is very difficult to accept linear conceptions of progress that societies evolve towards a higher state. It's really shaken our collective confidence in progress, as well as science and reason. Science, instead of being an instrument of enlightenment, became a weapon of war, such as with the development of the Atom bomb, or of totalitarian systems as both communism and fascism made claims to be based on scientific knowledge of what man could become.
This is why popular culture is so saturated with ideas about dystopian societies (i.e. the opposite of utopia) and apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic landscapes as we are still really trying to come to terms with this. Another aspect is the overall crisis of 'progressive' centre-left politics which is being pushed to support free market economics because it is more 'realistic' than having ideals whilst expecting society to experience moral progress, as well as widespread fears over environmental problems because we don't think we can 'progress' beyond our current reliance on fossil fuels and may therefore regress to a barbaric society as we run out of oil or as climate change gets underway.
All the chaos of the twentieth century is pinned on the fault of "human nature" without really knowing exactly what that nature is in a scientific sense. Our understanding of man is still largely based on philosophy, to a greater or lesser extent derived from religious teaching, presented as fact. 'human nature' is a concept roughly equivalent to the soul in belonging to an immaterial conception of man in which mind and body are separate; hence the moral attributes of man are assumed to be separate from our physical being and socioeconomic life and therefore beyond the scope of scientific understanding. Whether we can have scientific knowledge about man and morality as the basis for further secularization is still up for debate.
The picture is further complicated by the fact that the trend towards secularization has somewhat gone into reverse over the latter half of the twentieth century; The US has completely broken with this trend and despite being the worlds largest economy, it is also one of the most religious developed countries. The collapse of Communism also put this idea in doubt because it brought into question not only ideas about social progress, but also the possibility of atheist societies (because communism utterly failed to convince its own population that there was no god despite having every advantage to do so). The rise of Islamic Fundamentalism also gives weight to this, as people like ISIS and Al Qaeda are straight out of our history books representing something deeply medieval. In some ways the rise of the New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and co, is a revival of a secular trend, but it's still very early days to see where this is going.
It is perfectly possible that in 200 years there may be no religion, but we lack the confidence in reason and science to be sure. I suspect that religion won't simply die out, but would probably have to be "killed" by a form of militant atheism, because it is so closely interwoven with our moral and social ideas. I'm not sure whether that would be a good thing as the problem with the idea of progress are pretty legitimate.
Domenic
Active Member
I can't remember where i read this, or perhaps heard it.. but i've heard/read that religions are slowl declining in favour of science.. would you say this is true? in 200 years from now might there be no religion ? your opinion
the Bible says, "The nations will destroy religion overnight.
JustCallMeNick
Member
I don't recall reading that. Verse?
Well, in my beliefs, religion is indeed slowly dying, regardless to whither it is in favor of science or other factors.
Even Prophet Muhammad predicted this saying that with each generation sense of believing gets worse than its predecessor.
I'm not implying or pointing to anything here, I'm just commenting on the OP.
Even Prophet Muhammad predicted this saying that with each generation sense of believing gets worse than its predecessor.
I'm not implying or pointing to anything here, I'm just commenting on the OP.
And many other religions have been around for thousands of years longer.