http://www.secularism.org.uk/81737.html
Editorial by Terry Sanderson
Forget the propaganda about a religious revival: atheism is the real demographic phenomenon – so where does that leave the NSS?
An article by Gregory Paul & Phil Zuckerman in The Edge challenges the widely held belief that there is some kind of worldwide religious revival in progress. Quite the reverse, the authors say, the demographic explosion has been in the number of atheists and non-believers. Their interpretation of the statistics is convincing, but regrettably the conclusion is that these atheists have not been created by the arguments put out by the likes of Dawkins, Sam Harris and the NSS – it’s more to do with material comfort and the security supplied by welfare states in advanced European countries. In the West religion is dying on its feet, but in poorer countries it maintains its stranglehold. The American exception is explained by the highly competitive nature of American society, which has a dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest ethos that creates enormous insecurity in the population which then turns to religion for support. But even in the United States, the enormous rise in the number of people who declare they have no religion dwarfs other religions. There are now more declared unbelievers in America than there are Jews, Mormons and Muslims put together.
The traditional Christian denominations are either shrinking or static. The mega churches are not, in fact, proof of huge new congregations, they are simply existing Christians from smaller churches that are fed up with the traditional hymns and sermons formula and go instead for the leisure-centre-stroke-shopping-mall experience of the mega church. The smaller churches, with older congregations, are closing at an accelerating rate.
Islam is the only “faith” that is defying the trend, and that is because of the rapid rates of Muslim reproduction, not because of the conversion of “infidels” – the number of converts to Islam is actually quite piffling.
So, given that the NSS, Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens et al can’t persuade believers to give up their faith, do we have a purpose?
Yes. The burgeoning numbers who are abandoning religion are not doing so because of any great conscientious crisis, they have merely become indifferent to it. They see it as irrelevant to their lives. It is our job to ensure that they do not, by a process of inertia, stand by and allow religious bodies to continue their demands for privilege and political influence unopposed. It is our job to raise awareness among this vast constituency of non-believing, but indifferent, people that religion would still very much like to run their lives for them. And not in ways that they would find congenial.
The job of the NSS, then, is to build on the abandonment of religion, and to turn the “indifferents” into well-informed secularists. We can learn to live happily with the religious among us, but they, in turn, must realise that they no longer have a right to impose their way of life on an unwilling population.
Find the must-read article from the edge here.
See also: The few remaining British Jews will be ultra-orthodox
