Why is religious belief fading?

In an Edge article titled “Why the Gods are not winning,” Gregory Paul & Phil Zuckerman characterize the belief that religion is gaining ground in the 21st century as a myth.   First, they present some real life statistics:

The evangelical authors of the WCE [World Christian Encyclopedia] lament that no Christian “in 1900 expected the massive defections from Christianity that subsequently took place in Western Europe due to secularism…. and in the Americas due to materialism…. 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. A large percentage of their members are the children, grandchildren or the great-great-grandchildren of persons who in their lifetimes were practicing Christians” (italics added). (The WCE probably understates today’s nonreligious. They have Christians constituting 68-94% of nations where surveys indicate that a quarter to half or more are not religious, and they may overestimate Chinese Christians by a factor of two. In that case the nonreligious probably soared past the billion mark already, and the three great faiths total 64% at most.)

Far from

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Bush announces the newest (and worst yet) reason for having our troops in Iraq

Look how low the bar has now gotten.   This is from the President's May 2, 2007 address to the Associated General Contractors of America: ..."But slowly but surely, the truth will be known. Either we'll succeed, or we won't succeed. And the definition of success as I described is sectarian…

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A trip to the neighborhood psychic store

Last Saturday, I was running some errands with my daughters when we passed by a store called “Mystic Valley.”  I mentioned to my daughters (they are six and eight) that some people believe that they can tell the future and read other peoples minds.  My daughters were incredulous.  They thought I was being silly, so they made me “pinky swear” that I was telling the truth.  I pinky swore before making a U-turn to head back to the neighborhood psychic store.

“Come on,” I said.  “Let’s go into the store and check out the people who believe that other people can tell the future and read their minds.”  My daughters were still suspicious that I was making this up, but into the store we went.

The first thing you notice is the smell of incense.  We passed by the rack of psychic magazines, then the shelves of crystals, the piles of drums, and some ethnic carvings before noticing that there were about seven small tables scattered throughout the store, each of them with two people seated facing each other.  Many of the experts were holding the customers’ hands.  If you listened closely, you could hear the psychics counseling the customers.

“Now do you believe me?” I whispered to my daughters.  They didn’t know what to think.

I walked up to the checkout counter and asked the pleasant soft-spoken man what was going on at the tables.  He indicated that some of the people were psychics, others were doing tarot card …

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