In my new study of 137 countries (1), I also found that atheism increases for countries with a well-developed welfare state (as indexed by high taxation rates). Moreover, countries with a more equal distribution of income had more atheists. My study improved on earlier research by taking account of whether a country is mostly Moslem (where atheism is criminalized) or formerly Communist (where religion was suppressed) and accounted for three-quarters of country differences in atheism.His main thesis stems from the phenomenon of religion declining as personal wealth increases. He cites the reason as people having less of a need for supernatural beliefs when the tangible, natural world is providing for their needs. He says the majority of the world will come to view religion as completely irrelevant by 2041.
Political Scientist Eric Kaufmann holds the opposite view, citing the fact that Atheists have fewer children than religious people. He thinks this could indicate the religious mindset will proliferate due to religious folks simply breeding more than Atheists. But what is the significance of the prolific breeding of religious people?
Biotechnologist Thomas Rees poses this question in his essay "Will the Religious Inherit the Earth?" In this piece, he discusses Kaufmann's research and comes to the conclusion that the breeding aspect could tip the odds in favor of the religious purely due to fertility and childbearing rates among them.
Barber, however, dismisses the breeding-related evidence, saying "...Yet, noisy as they can be, such groups are tiny minorities of the global population and they will become even more marginalized as global prosperity increases and standards of living improve."
He also says that as women become more integrated into the workforce, they will have fewer children, even if they are members of a religious fundamentalist group: "Moreover, as religious fundamentalists become economically integrated, young women go to work and produce smaller families, as is currently happening for Utah's Mormons," he says.
If a recent PEW study is any indication of a solid answer to the question, Kaufman may be correct. The study, performed by PEW in 2012, indicates a huge upswing in Atheism, with 20% of Americans now identifying as Agnostic, Atheist or "Unaffiliated" with a religion. This number represents the largest percentage of people in PEW's history of polling who identify as non-religious.
It is clear that the growth of Atheism or "unaffiliated" people is growing at an incredibly rapid rate in the United States, but it seems that being non-religious is also exploding globally. The UK's Daily Mail reported an extensive 2010 study that showed unaffiliated individuals as the "third largest global group" behind Christians and Muslims, placing the unaffiliated ahead of Hindus, Buddists, Jews and all other religious affliations.
In the 70's, the atheists proudly declared that in the future, all of America would be atheist. It didn't happen; instead, the "Jesus people" movement happened. In the 80's and 90's, new religious movements sprang up.
Meanwhile, when the Iron Curtain fell in the 90's, tons of former atheists from Soviet countries eagerly took up religion again. Communism was supposed to supplant religion. Not only did it fail, but there are now more Christians in Communist China than in any other place.
Banning religion just gives people more thirst for it, and declaring that "God is dead", or lumping ALL religions in one category, as the atheists frequently do, just makes them look ignorant.
Let's face it, atheism is truly dead. Clinging to a blind faith in the nonexistence of God is just as absurd as being a Bible-thumping fundamentalist, and is often just as dogmatic and rigid, if not more so. If we believe that man is more highly evolved than apes, we must concede that man, unlike the apes, can conceive of higher mystical truths. Instead of attempting to eradicate religion, or hoping that religion will somehow magically disappear when people are more educated (try to explain why Newton and Einstein were not atheists!) we would be well-advised to promote those that are based upon reason, logic and ethics, promoting the well-being of all people.