Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Religion's slow demise

The theoretical physicist Laurence Krauss said we are all stardust. "You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded...So forget Jesus. Stars died so you could live."

Christianity is waning in England and could be outnumbered by non-believers within 20 years. A study by researchers at the House of Commons Library concluded that Christianity had declined to 69 percent of the population while those with no religion increased to 22 percent. It showed there were 41 million Christians in Britain, down nearly 8 percent since 2004. Meanwhile, the number of nonbelievers stood at 13.4 million, up 49 percent over the same period. The research is considered authoritative because it examined a sample size of 50,000 people.

“If these populations continue to shrink and grow by the same number of people each year,” the study said, “the number of people with no religion will overtake the number of Christians in Great Britain in 20 years.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation placed a full-page ad in a form of an open letter in today’s New York Times urging liberal and nominal Roman Catholics to “quit” their church over its war against contraception.

“As a member of the ‘flock’ of an avowedly antidemocratic Old Boys Club, isn’t it time you vote with your feet? Please, exit en Mass,” the advert recommends. The ad concludes by inviting nominal Catholics to “join those of us who put humanity above dogma.”

The NYT required FFRF to water down its headline from the original "It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church," to "It’s Time to Consider Quitting the Catholic Church." FFRF co-president, Dan Barker, called that decision “a sign of the Catholic Church’s inordinate power to intimidate and muzzle criticism.”

FFRF's other co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor explained “The Roman Catholic hierarchy would wither away without the support, financial and otherwise, of its members."

1 comment:

ajohnstone said...

Your fears are totally without foundation.

Falling birth rates will slow the world's Muslim population growth over the next two decades, reducing it on average from 2.2 percent a year in 1990-2010 to 1.5 percent a year from now until 2030, a new study says."The declining growth rate is due primarily to falling fertility rates in many Muslim-majority countries," it said

Muslims will number 2.2 billion by 2030 compared to 1.6 billion in 2010, making up 26.4 percent of the world population compared to 23.4 percent now.60 percent of the world's Muslims will live in the Asia-Pacific region in 2030, 20 percent in the Middle East, 17.6 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, 2.7 percent in Europe and 0.5 percent in the Americas. Muslims in France will rise to 6.9 million, or 10.3 percent of the population, from 4.7 million (7.5 percent), in Britain to 5.6 million (8.2 percent) from 2.9 million and in Germany to 5.5 million (7.1 percent) from 4.1 million (5 percent). The Muslim share of the U.S. population will grow from 0.8 percent in 2010 to 1.7 percent in 2030,

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/27/us-muslims-population-idUSTRE70Q12D20110127