@wolfgang59 said
Christianity is on the decline in every first world country on the planet.
(Yes, even USA where atheism is frowned upon to the extent that there
are hordes of "closet atheists" ). All religion is in decline amongst
educated people around the world. (Percentages of atheists correlates
very well with level of education.) Within 50 years (and I hope sooner)
r ...[text shortened]... as astrology and cartomancy. There is simply
no rational reason to believe in supernatural beings.
This is actually a misunderstanding of the real situation.
Rodney Stark has pointed out that as religion has retreated it has not been replaced by pure rationality.
Stark points to Sweden, which, he notes, "is almost always presented as exhibit A in the case for the triumph of secularization."
But how secular is Sweden? Stark points out that "more than 20 percent of Swedes say they believe in reincarnation; half believe in mental telepathy; and nearly one in five believes in the power of lucky charms.
A third believe in New Age medicine such as 'healing Crystals'; 20 percent would consider purchasing their personal horoscope; 10 percent would consult a medium; and nearly two out of five believe in ghosts."
https://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=1705
Stark is, actually, an atheist. However, he has given tremendous interviews on the
reality behind atheism's presence in a society. You can find polls of scientists in the 19th century which show that a similar amount were atheists then as they were now. There are polls from France in the late 18th century which showed that only 72% of people self-identified as Christians.
Nietzsche, in the Antichrist, stated that one of the great scandals is that still
a third of academics consider themselves Christians. He did not cite any poll, but by his judgment of his peer group, perhaps around 2/3 had already rejected Christianity. This would have been in the 1880s & 1890s Germany.
If you actually look at historic church attendance rates, Stark said, many of these cathedrals in European cities were largely empty as far back as the records go with some exceptional periods. He said that the same is true in Latin America, and the upticks in religiosity among South Americans correlate with the arrival of Protestantism. One of his books largely deals with the idea that
competition is good for religion.
We aren't actually supposed to view religion as retreating, but we are supposed to actually be aware that religion had made an extremely strong assault into the consciousness of Europeans & Americans after WWI and up until the 1960s. It was a reivval of sorts, perhaps not unlike the revival in the Americas at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.
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University educations correlating with liberalism and a lack of religious belief is
no surprise. They are places of indoctrination and function to create cosmopolitan cultures in far-flungpalces so that they become reflections of their metropoles.