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-- Fear of hell
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100 years isn't that long. It's shorter than a few people's lifetime, and its possible with advances in medicine we may get to see 2100 I don't see billions of people giving up their faith.

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Originally posted by Domesticated A hundred years is a long time. It's been about 130 since light bulbs were invented, and 150 since the combustion engine. Think of how far we've come in that time. Planes, computers, spacecraft, medicine. Think of how differently people think now. Think of what the common man knows now compared to then. People in 1850 still believed in witchcraft and alchemy. The human race travels extremely fast. I have no doubt that when people look back on the year 2000, they will see our religious beliefs in the same light that we see the foolish people who believed in witchcraft.

but established religion is at least what, 6000 years old? and belief in the spiritual etc is as old as man himself. i just dont share your optimism. christianity is ~2000 years old and shows absolutely no sign of abating. given that the existence of god is neither provable nor disprovable, the same questions concerning us today will be exactly the same ones being questioned in another 2000 years.

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Originally posted by Domesticated Not this brain, or yours for that matter.

well, i doubt our brains are any different to anybody else's, but as with any instinct, reason and free will can overide 'programming'.

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Originally posted by Domesticated I think that in another hundred or so years, religion will be almost dead.

Or perhaps quite the opposite.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN but established religion is at least what, 6000 years old? and belief in the spiritual etc is as old as man himself. i just dont share your optimism. christianity is ~2000 years old and shows absolutely no sign of abating. given that the existence of god is neither provable nor disprovable, the same questions concerning us today will be exactly the same ones being questioned in another 2000 years.

Things are accelerating. Most of the things that challenge religion have come about at the end of those 6,000 years. I'm not sure religion will die out, but it might become less and less popular.

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Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On Or perhaps quite the opposite.

Dead almost be will religion?

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN but established religion is at least what, 6000 years old? and belief in the spiritual etc is as old as man himself. i just dont share your optimism. christianity is ~2000 years old and shows absolutely no sign of abating. given that the existence of god is neither provable nor disprovable, the same questions concerning us today will be exactly the same ones being questioned in another 2000 years.

True, but for a long time we were in the "dark ages", where people were naive and required religion to explain how shitty their lives were. Now, I think people ponder a lot less about themselves and their family; they listen to the radio, they buy clothes, they lust after products. They're too tied up in society and themselves to consider the implications of their actions or any spirituality the way people did 200 years ago.

Most young people don't seem to have the patience or the time for religion, and this is why I think it's fading fast. Many people in their mid-30s have also rejected religion to an even greater degree than their parents did in the '70s, and this is important because they're the people who are having children now, and often choosing not to bring them up in a religious environment, meaning religion's grip is weakened with each new generation.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN well, i doubt our brains are any different to anybody else's, but as with any instinct, reason and free will can overide 'programming'.

No, our brains are completely different to everyone else's; they actually work. You should know that by now.

Secondly, while it may have been "proved" that religion is hard-wired, I still don't believe that. I think religion is something you acquire from birth, like speech. Can you really tell me that if a baby was raised in a completely silent environment until age 10, it would start speaking spontaneously?

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Things are accelerating. Most of the things that challenge religion have come about at the end of those 6,000 years. I'm not sure religion will die out, but it might become less and less popular.

perhaps, but like i said im just not that optimistic.

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Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On Or perhaps quite the opposite.

If you're going to make a statement like that, explain.

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Originally posted by Domesticated Secondly, while it may have been "proved" that religion is hard-wired, I still don't believe that. I think religion is something you acquire from birth, like speech. Can you really tell me that if a baby was raised in a completely silent environment until age 10, it would start speaking spontaneously?

gotta rush, but i just wanted to point out that you are horribly wrong when it comes to speech/language, at least as far as chomsky and the entire field of linguistics are concerned. i like your work, but chomsky > you

im sure lira could post some on the topic, its not something im that familair with.

In many ways, we could be considered "hard-wired" to respond positively to many of the social components which surround religious ceremonies and belief systems. They are confirmational of both physiological techniques we originally utilized to form social networks in the first place as well as social responses in no mild form of hysteria. Religion is first and foremost, a meme.

It is because of this I agree with pkc - religion will not die. Notwithstanding semantical arguments on just what is meant by "religion" in the first place, history thusfar has indicated that religions quite often "die" off; the rituals may change, but the religion never truly goes away.

It seems to me that the people most willing to kill and to die would quite readily do so for their beliefs. Does our modern competence serve itself by fusing the ideals of peace and reason in the face of an enemy who does not sway to logic, but to fictional beings insecure with their omnipotence? What I am saying is that religion is becoming, more and more, quite poised to kill the world if it doesn't convert. And technology has finally given those frothing throngs a way to do so.

//P.S. Jews did 9/11.

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Originally posted by Domesticated I don't think know a single person under the age of 30 who has a firm belief and respect for God and Christianity, and I think that in another hundred or so years, religion will be almost dead.

You need to look around more, because there's a lot of them.

People will always need somesort of functional explanation of phenomenon that surround them. If religion is to be faded out, it can only be replaced by science, and science isn't practical to everyone.

It's something we tend to take for granted, growing up in highly industrialized cultures with easy access to information and technology, but science is something you can only sustain with an incredibly high degree of specialization that you can only achieve with very large concentrations of population. Firstly, you need highly specialized scientists to do science. But since those scientists are too busy to do anything but, you need specialists to take care of all their needs - home builders, shop keepers, a capitalist system to sustain them... Then, you need an infrastructure to spread information about scientific discoveries. Scientific knowledge is constantly changing, so you need means by which to keep people informed; information technology, journals for publication, the internet...

There's been a significant movement of people into urban centers in recent history, and in large part it's made all of this possible. But you won't see religion fading out until every person on earth is in a similar situation. Seeing as the few of us are already screwing up the planet's atmosphere, you'd have much bigger problems than a few religious zealots.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN gotta rush, but i just wanted to point out that you are horribly wrong when it comes to speech/language, at least as far as chomsky and the entire field of linguistics are concerned. i like your work, but chomsky > you im sure lira could post some on the topic, its not something im that familair with.

I didn't opt for the Child Language Acquisition modules when I had the choice so I don't really know much about this field, but as far as I do know, Chomsky and his entire model of rationalism doesn't really apply to CLA because you can't talk to a child about their knowledge of language and thus can't do any research with them.

I also personally hold it that Chomsky is a fucking idiot.

I'm more into Spirituality now than I've ever been. Religion is dying out while Spirituality is gaining momentum.

Everything is a play in consciousness against the background of awareness.

-edit-

I meant traditional Religions that shove doctrines down peoples throats.

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Originally posted by Cpt.Cocaine You need to look around more, because there's a lot of them.

Perhaps in Canada. I made it clear I was talking about the situation in Australia.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN no way. religion (or at least a belief in god or the unknowable) will be around as long as we are. its hard-wired into our brain apparently (arbiter can teach you more about that).

I think that may be overstating things. We certainly have cognitive predispositions that facilitate attributing unexplained or ambiguous phenomena to agents--whether it's other people (elaborate conspiracies, for example), spirits, gods, or what-have-you. That this tendency is most notable in children and alzheimer's patients, on the other hand, suggests that the cognitive toolkit of a healthy adult is much less "wired" for religion, although to the extent that religion is acquired during childhood, another set of cognitive biases is likely to make shedding those beliefs more difficult than rejecting them if one never believed (this thread is probably an example of exactly that.) Simultaneously, other characteristics that, for example, are involved in social development & interaction facilitate the spread of religion and reinforce it through various mechanisms. These psychological and cognitive traits explain why so many religions have emerged throughout human history, but they obviously do not deterministically lead to individual religious belief.

I think there is reason to hope for a substantial reduction in religiosity over the next few centuries. Belief in "god" and other measures of religiosity have generally been shrinking for some time now in the western world, and that trend seems likely to continue although it would be foolish to expect any dramatic change within a few generations. However, when you consider all the utterly incomprehensible things that people manage to believe, I doubt religion will ever go away entirely (much less magical thinking more generally.)

That said, it might be interesting to try some large-scale form of eugenics aimed at breeding hyperactive agency detection out of the species. That could be unwise, though. Although the "obvious" evolutionary advantages of hyperactive agency detection (e.g. predator detection) are largely obsolete for modern man, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is a "vestigial" characteristic. For instance, there is some evidence to suggest that autism is associated with deficient agency detection. It would be difficult to predict how such a change could affect social development. Maybe we could isolate a small section of the population and just experiment with them. Of course, the amount of time it would take to see if we were getting any results probably makes the whole thing impracticable...

Re: Fear of hell

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Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles I think the fear of hell was what really made me start taking religion seriously in the first place. Eighth grade was when it started to click for me, so I started going to church a lot more and reading the Bible. Then in high school I also developed a conviction that the survival of Christianity was vital to the preservation of Western culture. I stopped going to church in my freshman year of college. I was going out with a girl (still my girlfriend today) but I felt uncomfortable about dating her because she was a non-Christian. I think I can remember her asking me wonderingly why I was a Christian and not being able to give a very good answer, which bothered me. I can remember, at that time, sort of wishing that I wasn't a Christian, so that our belief systems would mesh together more neatly. Then I tried to look at the beliefs I had affirmed for years from the outside, to see how strong or weak they looked when I stepped beyond the assumptions that guided my religious views. I guess I was trying to deconstruct my faith, extirpate it from my mind. And I can remember a specific day, sitting on a bench in the sun and thinking about this, and feeling something inside myself sort of like what you might feel after a breakup, or when someone you really like rejects you. Maybe that was the point when I "lost faith." At night I would half-dream about being sent to hell for not believing, and in some of these twisted visions my girlfriend or parents would be there, too, being tortured alongside me. Eventually these thoughts stopped, but occasionally they still resurface. Fear excited over and over again can stay burned into your head even after you've concluded that it's irrational. Sometimes I find myself frightened by the possibility that maybe I'm really wrong not to believe in God and that when I die I'll be sent to hell and suffer eternally for being a non-believer. Maybe in spite of having thought pretty carefully about religion, I reached the wrong conclusions. Yeah, a lot of the ideas in religions don't make any sense to me, and the evidence in their favor really seems spare to non-existent, and it seems like most of the world's smartest people don't put much stock in the fire and brimstone stuff (even if some pretty smart ones are religious in other senses), but it seems like my ideas about what "makes sense" or what constitutes "good evidence" could be off-kilter in some way, and I could end up believing the wrong things because of that. And then I wonder whether I could ever genuinely worship a god who chose to deal out eternal pain to those who didn't believe in him, even if I were convinced there was good evidence for his existence. I'm leaning toward "no." I have been up all night.

You'v come to the wrong place for that mate...

hey, don't use arguments to convince me of something i originally found quite bollocks only to turn the tables on me once again!

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Originally posted by Arbiter I think that may be overstating things. We certainly have cognitive predispositions that facilitate attributing unexplained or ambiguous phenomena to agents--whether it's other people (elaborate conspiracies, for example), spirits, gods, or what-have-you. That this tendency is most notable in children and alzheimer's patients, on the other hand, suggests that the cognitive toolkit of a healthy adult is much less "wired" for religion, although to the extent that religion is acquired during childhood, another set of cognitive biases is likely to make shedding those beliefs more difficult than rejecting them if one never believed (this thread is probably an example of exactly that.) Simultaneously, other characteristics that, for example, are involved in social development & interaction facilitate the spread of religion and reinforce it through various mechanisms. These psychological and cognitive traits explain why so many religions have emerged throughout human history, but they obviously do not deterministically lead to individual religious belief.

yeah, that's pretty much what i meant. you know, if i had a clue about what i was saying

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Originally posted by Arbiter I think there is reason to hope for a substantial reduction in religiosity over the next few centuries. Belief in "god" and other measures of religiosity have generally been shrinking for some time now in the western world, and that trend seems likely to continue although it would be foolish to expect any dramatic change within a few generations. However, when you consider all the utterly incomprehensible things that people manage to believe, I doubt religion will ever go away entirely (much less magical thinking more generally.)

perhaps, and this trend can certainly be seen in some societies, but the opposite is also seen in others. i dunno, i just dont have enough faith (haha) in human beings. if we have these cognitive preconditions and if we are being brought into a world with a high level of religosity, i don't see how 'inherited ideologies' can ever be effectively challenged and prevented from replicating themselves.

indeed, i think an argument could be made that rampant consumerism and the hedonism fuelling advanced nations has played a part in the increasing number of godless heathens (who wants to go to church when they can party hard, smash drugs or have sex orgies)- am i right in assuming the less-developed nations have a much MUCH lower transition from religion to non belief? these levels of consumption are unlikely to remain untempered forever though, and as halcyon notes im not sure there's a reason to expect the increasing levels of godlessness to be an irresistable force with an inevitable path. when people no longer have their goods and lifestyles to enjoy, there's a very strong chance imo of people flocking back to spiritualism and religion, as a crutch for their unhappy existences.

while the numbers will obviously fluctuate, more godless commies today doesn't necessarily mean more of them tomorrow (unfortunately).

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Originally posted by Arbiter That said, it might be interesting to try some large-scale form of eugenics aimed at breeding hyperactive agency detection out of the species. That could be unwise, though. Although the "obvious" evolutionary advantages of hyperactive agency detection (e.g. predator detection) are largely obsolete for modern man, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is a "vestigial" characteristic. For instance, there is some evidence to suggest that autism is associated with deficient agency detection. It would be difficult to predict how such a change could affect social development. Maybe we could isolate a small section of the population and just experiment with them. Of course, the amount of time it would take to see if we were getting any results probably makes the whole thing impracticable...

lol.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I didn't opt for the Child Language Acquisition modules when I had the choice so I don't really know much about this field, but as far as I do know, Chomsky and his entire model of rationalism doesn't really apply to CLA because you can't talk to a child about their knowledge of language and thus can't do any research with them.

isn't it widely accepted that the capacity for language pre-dates the usage of speech? so in the context of domesticated's example, i certainly think that a child whom has been raised in a 'silent' environment for its whole life, will still have and use language, even if its of their own making.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I also personally hold it that Chomsky is a fucking idiot.

outside linguistics i tend to agree. i dont have much of an idea concerning linguistics though (can you tell! ) but his political philosophies that i am far more familiar with make me roll my eyes. to me he's like marx; awesome analysis but terrible solutions.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN isn't it widely accepted that the capacity for language pre-dates the usage of speech? so in the context of domesticated's example, i certainly think that a child whom has been raised in a 'silent' environment for its whole life, will still have and use language, even if its of their own making.

As I said I don't know much about Child Language Acquisition. My point was that Chomsky doesn't either, since his methods are useless in that area. I think it should be noted that Domesticated said "speech" as opposed to merely "language". There's a big difference in terms of drawing an analogy.

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outside linguistics i tend to agree. i dont have much of an idea concerning linguistics though (can you tell! ) but his political philosophies that i am far more familiar with make me roll my eyes. to me he's like marx; awesome analysis but terrible solutions.

This is a guy who once criticised a theory and then admitted he didn't really understand it, who continued to teach a theory even after one of his own students disproved it and, whenever I've read him, commits one logical fallacy after another and proves himself wrong with his own examples. One of my favourite Chomsky examples is this gem:

Chomsky: "The verb perform cannot be used with mass word objects... How do I know? Because I am a native speaker of the English language."

Yeah, except you can perform magic.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN outside linguistics i tend to agree. i dont have much of an idea concerning linguistics though (can you tell! ) but his political philosophies that i am far more familiar with make me roll my eyes. to me he's like marx; awesome analysis but terrible solutions.

Within linguistics, Chomsky is a pretty cool guy. eh has interesting hypotheses and eh doesn't afraid of anything like reducing linguistics to psychology

But, I'm no Chomskian. As a matter of face, the sole fact that he's a rationalists in the likes of Leibniz, Descartes, and Plato, already makes it hard for me to accept his way of thinking. It's just not my world =/

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Originally posted by Domesticated I think religion is something you acquire from birth, like speech. Can you really tell me that if a baby was raised in a completely silent environment until age 10, it would start speaking spontaneously?

Now, it wouldn't.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I also personally hold it that Chomsky is a fucking idiot.

Chomsky can be wrong, and he can be too much of an idealist. But an idiot? No matter how strongly I disagree with him, it's really unfair to say that about a person that single-handedly revolutionised both linguistics AND psychology.

The guy is a genius in his own right. A somewhat misguided one, but a genius nonetheless.

hey moral hazard, can you call up your buddies in hobart, tasmania and tell them to stop filling my mailbox with intelligent design propaganda? thanks

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Originally posted by Lira Chomsky can be wrong, and he can be too much of an idealist. But an idiot? No matter how strongly I disagree with him, it's really unfair to say that about a person that single-handedly revolutionised both linguistics AND psychology. The guy is a genius in his own right. A somewhat misguided one, but a genius nonetheless.

As I posted in that thread about idiocy (I think it was your thread, actually) I consider idiocy a temporary state that everyone can and does occupy. Chomsky is certainly capable of being an idiot and when I come across him he's usually doing just that. His achievements do not absolve him from the stupid things he has said.

Let's say he's both a mercurial genius and a mercurial idiot capable of the sublime and the ridiculous.

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Originally posted by Lira Chomsky can be wrong, and he can be too much of an idealist. But an idiot? No matter how strongly I disagree with him, it's really unfair to say that about a person that single-handedly revolutionised both linguistics AND psychology. The guy is a genius in his own right. A somewhat misguided one, but a genius nonetheless.

+1

I might not always agree with him, but he gets things right in 90% of the talks I've seen.

That is to say, I don't think there are very many times I've seen him saying anything idiotic...

the moral side of the teachings is great should be practiced. beliving that something watches over us gives us a sense of security and purpose and there's nothing wrong with that and it may even be probable. but there's no way of knowing and for that reason alone it should be kept vague. its when you start getting into specifics behind religion that the entire concept begins to sound hollow and absurd.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN hey moral hazard, can you call up your buddies in hobart, tasmania and tell them to stop filling my mailbox with intelligent design propaganda? thanks

Sorry, all my buddies fully endorse evolution. You need to seek the help of an evangelical... good luck finding a reasonable one.

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