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Question of our day. Which will disappear first? Organized religion or mankind and the natural world. Many renowned scientists and writers gave up on mankind surviving: Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells -- recently in our time George Carlin, Kurt Vunnegut, Steven Hawking. Unless there's a drastic change of consciousness, '"be fruitful and multiply", "we're the image of God" (What horseshit!) humans will run out of living space and resources like bacteria growing on a Petri dish. In spite of all the scientific evidence religion continues to plague humanity.

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Aristopus 7 Jan 5
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Humanity is capable of ending its own existence, but despite everything that's turned to shit in the world of late, I am still unconvinced that this is still very likely. Humanity can certainly suffer individually and severally but its complete extinction is less certain. Human society and culture are complex systems, and complex systems are inherently resilient in terms of survival if not in terms of thriving.

On the other hand, religion is inherently unsustainable, so despite our several propensities to be taken in by it, I believe religion is apt to continue what it's already doing to itself: marginalizing and diluting itself out of relevance. There will always be a few people in thrall to it, but I think that fundamentalism will become part of the true fringe within the next 3 or 4 generations, and religion generally, within the next millennium. This presupposes, however, that civil society will continue to maintain itself overall, so that people can be fairly far up the hierarchy of needs and continue to be educated overall.

Knowledge and a respect for facts, evidence and scientific endeavor are the death-knell of religion. That is why religion keeps trying to plunge us into a new dark age. If they succeed, then we'll either have a WW2-style detour of human suffering, or possibly (but less likely) a tipping-point scenario where we're set back a thousand years and have to rebuild a lot of society from the ground up. In that latter scenario my predictions would be off. However in the former scenario my predictions would remain basically on-target.

"religion is inherently unsustainable" It's been here since the previous hominids. But looking at it in the modern age you might be right. Migrants are drowning trying to escape the overpopulation and they're still making babies.

@Aristopus I regard religion as a stopgap for human ignorance. Now that humanity is gradually remedying its ignorance, the gap in which the gods live grows ever smaller. For this trend to continue, as I said, society has to remain reasonably functional and science-driven and people have to remain reasonably educated. So long as that situation continues, religion will continue to dilute itself out of relevance. To the extent civil society hiccups or collapses, religion will enjoy a resurgence. However when religion re-establishes itself, it tends to be authoritarian / fundamentalist religion, which in turn is the least sustainable kind. For humanity to remain subject to that sort of religious ideation for many generations, it would have to devolve most of the way back to the bronze age and most human knowledge and history would have to be near-totally lost.

I don't think that scenario is very likely and so I think that religion is doomed in the long run. Some things, once known, can't be un-known.

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I fear organized religion will outlive mankind and in a number of areas even help to speed up mankind's demise.

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