Why atheism will be the biggest religion
This was written in 2015, apologize if there are things I couldn’t comprehend at that time.
Firstly this is an opinion, you can criticize my writings or support it as well. Oh, this is also a flowing-mind article too, if you can easily get bored by reading don’t bother to read this article. This is an article of atheism that was made by an-Indonesian-Muslim-geography-student-ex-atheist that you might never read that combination before.
Before I start here is a cheeky quote :
People are always changing. As a young generation in Indonesia I see how people of my generation are changing. We born with some religious stuffs and also some scientific stuffs. We are learning a lot more about those scientific stuffs day by day and less about those religious stuffs. I am not saying that being religious is irrelevant with science growth, you can define by yourself. But young people nowadays grow with excellent education, or you can say in a religious way as worldly education. That worldly education teaches us many things about science and development of human civilization but not with religion.
The fact that science made a lot of great civilizations since ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia leads us indirectly to an idea that to make a great country we should learn more about science. We can find several evidences that some great countries in the past come with good religious stuffs such as Egyptian Empire, Greek Empire, Chinese Kingdoms, Roman Empire, Abbasid Caliphate, and many more. But it is difficult to find a single evidence of great country with good religious stuffs nowadays. The developed countries, just mention the G-8 countries, are mostly growing with science and technology not with religion.
You can always say that there are many religious people doing their scientific work well on most of those countries and that’s a potential. But a potential energy is never used if you don’t make a move. It is also science who stands against some basic principal of religion. The most famous one is Darwin’s. Religion especially mine, Islam, doesn’t accept this theory. As you can tell, the first reason of atheism growth: science is growing without religion.
The second is secular system. A sociologist, Peter Berger, defines secularization as ‘the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols’ (Berger, 1967). This is the honest definition. But in the ‘promotion’ side, secular system brings a new way to apply religion. Your country will not disturb your faith activity, while you help the country grows. The country is neutral in matters of religion. Politics should uninfluenced by religious belief. Secular system is implemented widely in the world and it becomes the basis of countries’ religion activity, especially in the western world and G-8 countries.
There are 6 countries of G-8 with secularism ideology and only 2 of them with ambiguous secularism ideology, Germany and United Kingdom. The last 2 countries are the most interesting part because they have an old debate about secularism, yet still stand on religious way. Church and state have a very close relationship in the UK, with the Queen being the Supreme Governor of the Church. But in United Kingdom 64% of 18–24 year old do not belong to any religion. Source: British Social Attitudes Survey, 2010. Theoretically you can be a secular atheist or you can be a secular theist and vice versa. But people outside there tend to play the role of secular atheist. Thus the definition of secularism and atheism become ambiguous. That ambiguity leads to a big number of secular atheist supporters and members as you can see on the number of atheists in the secular countries. That is why I make secularism as one of the reason.
The third, last, and obvious reason why atheism is growing is because religions made people fighting. As a human being, each one of us loves peace. The world that never be battling, no ministry of defense, no hate, no intolerance, we all are dreaming that kind of world. It is a basic thought of human being. Yet, that dream is vanishing because of religious extremists. I do not know, really, if those news are only propaganda or they are real ones. But your brain and heart will hurt if you know that 1,334 billion dollars are spent for defense for only 11 countries in the world (Stockholm Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, 2013). They said that they stand for defense, but they do attack for real. Imagine how many starving children that you can save their life with that 1,334 billion dollars. You can feed 1,2 billion children with some nice foods they never see before, three times a day in a year! Back to the topic, I don’t know if these news are propaganda or not, but in fact people are becoming skeptical to religion because of this. So if religious extremist people stop battling I think there will be a lot of enthusiasts of religion.
Those three will be the main reasons why atheism will be the biggest religion I think.
And for the last I show you these stats :
The acceleration of atheism in the United States is very high. It even passes the number of Catholic followers and it is growing rapidly.
Sorry for the long post here is a tortured potato
Yogyakarta, 11 October 2015