Dodece said:
@badgenome
No it would be ironic, because they would have fallen victim to a evolutionary process. Which is something that a great many of them don't believe actually happens.
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Funny, because I thought creationists denied biological evolution, not memetic evolution. So, still unironic.
Dodece said:
Look I am just asking how do you think people would react if they found themselves in that predicament. Which is something that actually happens a lot in this world. People lose their communities all of the time through wars, disasters, economic recessions, and persecution. All I want to know is how you think people would cope with the situation if it happens. How do you think they will feel. Will they become less fervent, lose their faith entirely, or will they react negatively to the world and other people. |
What happens in such a scenario depends very much on the particulars. Does this all happen in a vacuum? Do things continue just as they are, with the same standard of living and the same level of civil rights as we have now? Persecution has tended to make communities more compact and thus closer-knit. See: the Jews, or black Americans prior to civil rights. Remove that persecution, and the community will fracture. So as the religious become the minority, do the irreligious - particularly the intolerant anti-religious who can scarcely conceal their contempt already - attempt to use their political power to persecute them? Rather than destroy them, this will only strengthen their faith and resolve accordingly.
The decrease in religiosity has been inextricably tied to the increasing standard of living. However, irreligiosity and a high standard of living also correlate to a lower birth rate. Western nations who have loads of jobs that "no one wants to do" and thus resort to importing third world laborers are also importing people who are more religious than themselves, who have more children than themselves, and as this trend will continue until there is an economic reason for it to stop, it's hard to see religion ever disappearing.
Then, what if there is an economic collapse and it's no longer so desirable to immigrate to the West (not likely, since poorer countries tend to be harder hit in a downturn) or people simply will no longer tolerate foreigners "taking their jobs"? So there are no more religious immigrants coming. But in times of personal hardship, people have a tendency to turn to religion (e.g., prison converts). A severe economic downturn increases personal hardship on a massive scale, and so would likely see people becoming more religious rather than less.
Apathy and contentedness is religion's worst enemy, so if somehow everything kept trucking along nicely and nothing really bad happened and the present demographics were frozen in time, then the trend may continue and you might see a very sharp decline in religious belief over the course of our lives, though still never an absolute extinction. But this is, needless to say, highly unlikely.
