Quote:
Originally Posted by AshleyO
You see, that's a very interesting thing you bring up. I appreciate your clarification. I was always under the impression that you were white knighting for faith because you somehow felt it dangerous that skepticism became meaningfully prevalent. You kind of always sounded like faith must endure less humanity be damned, hence the reason I got the notion that you kept moving the goal post.
But you see, this doesn't exactly negate the notion that atheism is inevitable. Granted, humanity will always have to deal with dualistic thinking, which I think permits us to somehow allow assumption to be more important than meaningful revelation. But the fact of the matter is, atheism doesn't HAVE to dominate in a way that perhaps I depict my arguments and my tactics. All that's really required is the idea that humanity comes before faith. It's not unreasonable to look at the polls and see that countries around the world are becoming more and more humanist and more and more non-religious.
That is why I think what we're seeing is the death throws of faith in a very meaningful kind of way. Obviously for our generation, faith is something different. It's not exactly this total thing that the previous generations are gnashing their teeth over. Perhaps in our lifetime, being an atheist wont really be an important thing. I'm confident that it'll come to that.
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Oh, I'm optimistic that in our lifetime more and more people will get chill and religion will recede from politics. Churches actually get quite a bit of backlash from becoming political and tend to lose members if they do, depending on what their stance is (fighting against poverty tends not to lose members, but becoming vehemently against lets say birth control will).
There are also more humanist religious movements now, like in Buddhism there's the Engaged Buddhism movement where monastics realized they should help change the world for the better instead of hide in seclusion, or the Catholic Worker Movement in the states, Social Gospel Movement, Liberation Theology, etc.
I think optimistically religion will evolve into something more spiritual and individualistic rather than dogmatic, perhaps not entirely unlike the structure of aboriginal religions before colonialism.