Losing Our Religion

TWENTY EIGHT PERCENT OF AMERICANS have no religion, according to a recent study. The non religious can be classed as atheists, agnostics, and people who indicated that they have no particular religious beliefs, but are not necessarily atheits or agnostics. This is up considerably from about sixteen percent a little more than a decade ago. Clearly, the percentage of religious Americans is decreasing rapidly, will likely continue to decrease into the foreseeable future, and whether this trend will ever reverse is open to speculation. Perhaps it will. Perhaps, in some future decade, like the twenty forties, there will be another "great awakening", as there were in the seventeen forties and again in the eighteen forties, when religious fervor swept through America, and the Christian flock multiplied considerably. For all we know, it may eventuate that by the end of the twenty first century, nearly all Americans and much of the global population has been converted and welcomed into the evangelical Christian community. Thus is ever the potential for mass movements to sweep through human culture and change society. It seems doubtful, though: there was, after all, no such religious "awakening" in the twentieth century; it may well be that by the twentieth century arrived, advances in science had reached such a point that the scientific paradigm was replacing the religious one, as is obviously continuing today, and will presumably continue into the future. When you factor in members of religions other than Cristianity, the percentage of Americans who identify as "Christian" is dropping to about fifty percent, seeingly destined to keep dropping. The number of atheists and agnostics in America is already greater than the number of Catholics or evangelical fundamentalist protestants. And again, the rise of science, which began during the "scientific revolution" of the sixteenth century and has gained momentum in every subsequent century, and the rise of mass public education in western counries seem to be the causal factors. Science is not losing momentum. If anything, it is rushing ahead at breakneck speed, revealing new and wondrous knowledge about nature and the unvierse which dazzles us anew with each passing year and decade. If humanity does not destroy itself by misusing science and technology, the future, icluding the near future, will be filled with scientific marvels virtually inconceivable by us today. Artificial intelligence, super computers, genetic manipulation, revolutions in energy sources, will all drastically transform human civilization, making ancient traditional religions seem ever more primitive, simplistic, irrelevant. Science already has in essence taken the place of religion in offering us explanations of reality; that is not going to change. Religious belief is concentrated among the older generations. Of Americans under forty, about half of them reject religion altogether. Each new generation seems to be moving farther from traditional religious faith. It is not difficult to imagine a human future altogether devoid of organized religions, in which such institutions have been relegated entirely to history books. Whatever new forms of faith and worhsip evolve to replace our outdated ones, if there are any, will surely encompass a much greater modern awareness of the universe, and will seem more like science than religion.