Religion to Disappear By 2041 Claims New Study
Added by Rebecca Savastio on July 23, 2013.
Saved under Rebecca Savastio, World


Author and noted biopsychologist Nigel Barber has completed a new study that shows Atheism is most prevalent in developed countries, and, according to his projections, religion will completely disappear by 2041. His findings are discussed in his new book “Why Atheism Will Replace Religion.” A new study that clarifies his earlier research will be published in August. His findings focus on studying trends within countries around the world and the fact that “Atheists are heavily concentrated in economically developed countries”-

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.

http://guardianlv.com/2013/07/religion-to-disappear-by-2041-claims-new-study/

If religion is to go in extinction, what will be the fate of humans? What an evidence of time wastage in carrying out this study.

product of too many sleepless nights, stress and strain.

From all indications, this is right.
Now adays, you see lots of people asking questions. Ie
Why did God do this if he knew humans will do that.
Why did Mohammed (SAW) do this if he knew his followers will do that. (Same goes for other religions)
Etc etc. When people begin to ask too many questions it will not b long before they find an answer. And most of the people who believe in religion, are the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70, and part of 80s. The current youth, from 1991 upwards are getting smarter. And even with the speed of information, when a youth can know how too many religions we have, it will b pretty easy for him to know that religion is a fabrication.

ntoin, naija the most religious country and most corrupt in the world with the largest gap between rich and poor. abeg nigerians swallow your pride and accept this brilliant study.

measuring the future based on happenings in the last 50 years could be quite ambitious. Religion like culture is far stronger than what we think. Religion might be modified but it wouldnt go extinct globally

Some report!!! Lets see sha. But i doubt.Saying that religion may not play a center stage or people may decide to behave more in conformity with new societal modernize,scientific,westernized or secular etc. trends is highly likely.But saying religion goes? I doubt.People wonder off and when calamity strikes them,science can't explain! they refer to the divine.
I know for sure that religious mentality still resides in most humans regardless of how much they deny it.Particular since they can still question the authority or validity of faith or refer to there actions in terms of good and bad.
I also believe researchers suggest there is a part of humans that remains tired to beliefs.That can always trigger some questions on faith matters.So forgetting to pray or read scriptures or attend religious gathering always doesn't completely remove faith in someone.More over what is the size of the developed to under-developed.What are the chances the trend will not change in reverse and you see more developed nations embrace religion due to trends on natural disasters or certain questions about the earth and life!
I say this report may be grossly exaggerated !!!!

Mayb tru..since we are gradually replacing Gods law with so called human right n civilization..

Religion to disappear?, This is a very good news. If you look at all of the so called Holy Books that our people are into, they all portray the image of someone other than self. There is not a face of African people of any of these imported religions. To divide Africans they have manipulated religion to an extent that it trains Africans to become mental slaves to Caucasians through Christianity and mental slaves to Arabs through Islam. Remember you are the original people of the planet earth yet you are following another races view as to who or what god is according to them. That’s why Caucasians will make bible prophets white looking and Arabs will make their prophets look like their race.

I speak as an ambassador of who i represent. 100 years from now, Christianity would still be relevant. Infact, it would bear much fruit than it is now. You cant push JESUS in to obscurity. His relevance can not be undermined. His existence is proved by the works of His love.
That report would die unfulfilled. There are alot of problemps in the world, alot of hurting people, and there would still be all of those in future.... Jesus is still touching lives and would continue to do so. His dominion is incontestable. Those who did the research would live long and die and still discover the relevance of Jesus to our world.

Even if atheism or whatever it is called replaces Religion.
I still worship and belong to God Almighty.
Not Allah! Not Budha! Not Baphomet! Not Sango! Not Amadioha!

Christianity is not a religion but a way of life. and it will remain till Christ shall come

so long as the sun and moon exist....Jesus shall reign wherever they are. no scientist, projectors and predictors can declare the future. Forever o Lord thy word is settled.

My take is that Religion is a bondage as far as I'm concerned .
Religion disappearing by 2041 may be possible as predicted. .

I've embraced a Way of life which will last forever and whose Anchor is Christ Jesus .

Taste him today and see that He is good

Lilimax: My take is that Religion is a bondage as far as I'm concerned .
Religion disappearing by 2041 may be possible as predicted. .

I've embraced a Way of life which will last forever and whose Anchor is Christ Jesus .

Taste him today and see that He is good

Is religion on the wane? Personally, I believe so. Will it be extinct in 28 years i.e 2041? I don't think so. Perhaps in 60 years onwards.

saying religion will disappear is like saying scamrers will disappear in the future....religion can not disappear because

some people are just simply stupiid and the money that religious institutions make world wide on an annual basis is

more than most countries GDP....religion is just too lucrative of a business....

There is no consensus on how we got to this 4.5 billion-year-old piece of real estate called the earth. The best estimate says that modern man showed up some 200,000 years ago. The only consensus is that the first series of questions that crossed the mind of the first group of men and women who saw themselves on earth were: who am I? Where am I? How did I get here? Who made me? Where am I going from here? These questions are the original questions.

The search for answers to these original questions started from the very point they were first asked. They have continued until this day. Every now and then, century after century, we come up with new answers different from the ones before. These answers are tweaked and tweaked, promoted and advertized, until they become a force of nature called religion.

To understand how helpless we are in the face of this force, imagine a baby brought home from the hospital by its parents. When the baby opens its eyes, it sees the parents. The parents feed and care for the baby. In no time the baby looks up to the parents, especially the mother. The baby holds the parents in awe for all they do for it including, putting a roof over its head. To babies parents are gods. The words of the parents are the religion of childhood.

With time the baby begins to see the world outside of its parents’ house. It begins to see other houses and other parents and begins to question its original thoughts about its parents. Even when the child finds out that its parents are not all that it made them to be, out of habit and out of fear that there are no replacement parents out there that will accept it as a natural born, the child sticks to its parents. That is why most children of unfit parents, jailed parents and absentia parents find it hard to denounce their parents.

All cultures throughout history have come up with their answers to those original questions. It doesn’t matter how primitive a culture is. They come up with a story and over time the story develops. Expanding on the story, each culture tries to provide a guide on how to live this life in accordance with their story. The guide takes care of questions around life and death amongst other things. That is when the story becomes a religion.

And each religion sticks with its story, even when events raise questions about the credibility of the story or outright prove the story wrong. Most practitioners of every religion would rather follow it until they died. They rather find out the truth when they die than abandon the religion of their birth. And die they do, the believers and their religion alike.

The history of the world over centuries is littered with dead religions, dead gods and dead worshipers. In some ways, we are all children of a retired god. Key events in the world always retire religions and their gods. Traumatic world events always prove the old religions inadequate. The coming of the Europeans, for instance, essentially laid to eternal rest a lot of the African gods. Other events and movements like the Enlightenment reform religion. Reformation extends the life of a religion. An irreformable religion is one that is bound to implode.

The tragedy of Africa is that it reached the information age without first passing through the industrial age. In matters temporal, Africa got to the modern age without passing through the Enlightenment. That is why some people believe that a child was born holding a mini-Koran in its hand, or that a child came out of the womb holding a cross in its hand. Why mini-Koran? Why a cross? Why something we already know? Why does this kind of phenomenon only happen in societies that wallow in superstition? If it is a message from God, as some believe, why won’t God use the opportunity to send a definitive manual of life?

The Enlightenment instituted the culture of demanding empirical proof before believing. If a woman comes into the church and gives birth to a dead horse, you don’t clean up the floor and bury the horse. You send the horse to the lab and the woman to the hospital- mental and/or medical.

Every religion that comes begets a new one. Two hundred years from now the people that will occupy this world will look at our era and our religions that we fight for and die for and call our age the Extreme Dark Ages. In another two hundred thousand years, nobody will remember what god we fought for, killed for, or died for. Just like we have no idea what god the people who were on this earth 100,000 years ago fought for, killed for or died for.

It is hard to imagine it now, but after the Third World War and after a nuclear war, a new world will emerge with new religions. The old religions left standing will go through reformation. And subtly and gradually, new religions will replace the old. Because it takes hundreds of years for this kind of transformation to be visible, it is hard for those living in that age to notice the change as it happens. We won’t wake up one day and notice that our religion is dead.

It is hard to live without the concept of God because it is hard to live without an answer to the original questions, even if it is not definitive. That is why many will stick with their religion as if it is their parents. Virtually all religions place God beyond reach- at times above the sky. Do you know why? If God is within reach, God will suffer the fate of all parents – be critiqued and be seen to have fallen short.

The trouble with religion is that for every religion to survive and gain members and fend off competitions, it has to proclaim itself to be better than the others. That my religion is better than yours is like saying that my moon is better than yours. That my God is better than yours is to say that my sun is better than yours.

To be willing to fight for your God- which is to say, kill and die for your God, is like to climb on top of each other to pull the moon until it stands still on your side of the sky. It may sound stupid but it has been done before and continues to be done.

Those who worshipped the Greek gods used to believe that they had the final answer. Those who worshipped Oduduwa used to think that their story of the creation was the ultimate. The highest level of human stupidity is the belief that our religion is the final answer to these original questions- who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? Who made me? The arrogance of that assumption has no equal in human folly.

Religions come and go but the earth remains the same. Until we know the definitive truth about the very beginning; and until we answer the original questions without a doubt, religion will remain attractive. But religion will continue to promise us that we find the answers only when we die. Science is the only one trying to find answers to these questions while we are still alive. And science is the only one trying to get to the very beginning and empirically show it to us for the very first time. It may take science one million years to get there. But I am rooting for science not religion.

Read the bible well and use your head to think; it is an abuse of the brain if you can't use it to think! It is written "I am the God Of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Isreal)". Have you heard him mention "Okon", "Adebayo", "Uzordima", "Belema", or the God of Nigeria? The God you are calling is not your own, he has declared so! That is why when you Africans say "Amaka" call on him, he doesn't answer because he is not the God of "Amaka". For an experiment call on him privately to prove to you He is real by making NEPA give light for 24hours today, after all "He can do ALL things". Pardon me if I've destroyed your fantasy.

2 Corinthians 4:16-18 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

Great news... in 28years from this years.... Halleluyah... proud man musing... what happens to proud men like this... no need to curse... fortunately ooman and I will be around to witness instead of say 2000yrs

ooman:

dont be so certain about that, evolution is still less than 200 years old. Give us 2000 years and if people still think god worship is sane, u may talk then.

Whats more, a research was carried out unlike ooman's foretelling

On a more serious note, its note news

2 Thess 2:1-12
Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him,

2 That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand.

3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;

4 Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.

5 Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things?

6 And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time.

7 For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.

8 And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:

9 Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,

10 And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:

12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
KJV

I am happy to be living in times like this, oh rejoice with me....

Oh , I can't wait till 2041.

It will be good riddance to bad rubbish.
Religion,the biggest pile of dung ever secreted by man.
The biggest whopper ever sold.

Someone once said that..
" Humankind will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest".

Religion will still exist no matter wat at least for d next 100years why cos by then dis our genration of africans who cant think beyond some storybook written milleniums ago will be dead and their new generation may now be the enlightened ones who donot believe d cock and bull fairytale called religion so for now we need to learn to live with it.

plaetton: Oh , I can't wait till 2041.

It will be good riddance to bad rubbish.
Religion,the biggest pile of dung ever secreted by man.
The biggest whopper ever sold.

Someone once said that..
" Humankind will never be freeman until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest".

lol but do u really think religion will be extict by 2041 cos people like olaadegbu and so on may still be alive spreading their so called good news of people roasting in hell.

ninja4life: Religion will still exist no matter wat at least for d next 100years why cos by then dis our genration of africans who cant think beyond some storybook written milleniums ago will be dead and their new generation may now be the enlightened ones who donot believe d cock and bull fairytale called religion so for now we need to learn to live with it.

Religion will exist but its importance will be severely diminished


To hell with religion.

Dear God, can you give me a long life so that I can see how you slowly die in the future when onlythe mentally challenged and outcasts believe in you?

Will religion die off in 2041?. . .Not at all. . .But in 70-80 years to come religion will be completely dead in the west. . .As for places like Africa, Asia and the Middle east. . .Religion will still be strong but its dominance will be greatly reduced in those regions. . .

Lol...what if it goes the other way around?? All these predictions make no sense..

greyman: There is no consensus on how we got to this 4.5 billion-year-old piece of real estate called the earth. The best estimate says that modern man showed up some 200,000 years ago. The only consensus is that the first series of questions that crossed the mind of the first group of men and women who saw themselves on earth were: who am I? Where am I? How did I get here? Who made me? Where am I going from here? These questions are the original questions.

The search for answers to these original questions started from the very point they were first asked. They have continued until this day. Every now and then, century after century, we come up with answers different from the ones before. These answers are tweaked and tweaked, promoted and advertized, until they become a force of nature called religion.

To understand how helpless we are in the face of this force, imagine a baby brought home from the hospital by its parents. When the baby opens its eyes, it sees the parents. The parents feed and care for the baby. In no time the baby looks up to the parents, especially the mother. The baby holds the parents in awe for all they do for it including, putting a roof over its head. To babies parents are gods. The words of the parents are the religion of childhood.

With time the baby begins to see the world outside of its parents’ house. It begins to see other houses and other parents and begins to question its original thoughts about its parents. Even when the child finds out that its parents are not all that it made them to be, out of habit and out of fear that there are no replacement parents out there that will accept it as a natural born, the child sticks to its parents. That is why most children of unfit parents, jailed parents and absentia parents find it hard to denounce their parents.

All cultures throughout history have come up with their answers to those original questions. It doesn’t matter how primitive a culture is. They come up with a story and over time the story develops. Expanding on the story, each culture tries to provide a guide on how to live this life in accordance with their story. The guide takes care of questions around life and death amongst other things. That is when the story becomes a religion.

And each religion sticks with its story, even when events raise questions about the credibility of the story or outright prove the story wrong. Most practitioners of every religion would rather follow it until they died. They rather find out the truth when they die than abandon the religion of their birth. And die they do, the believers and their religion alike.

The history of the world over centuries is littered with dead religions, dead gods and dead worshipers. In some ways, we are all children of a retired god. Key events in the world always retire religions and their gods. Traumatic world events always prove the old religions inadequate. The coming of the Europeans, for instance, essentially laid to eternal rest a lot of the African gods. Other events and movements like the Enlightenment reform religion. Reformation extends the life of a religion. An irreformable religion is one that is bound to implode.

The tragedy of Africa is that it reached the information age without first passing through the industrial age. In matters temporal, Africa got to the modern age without passing through the Enlightenment. That is why some people believe that a child was born holding a mini-Koran in its hand, or that a child came out of the womb holding a cross in its hand. Why mini-Koran? Why a cross? Why something we already know? Why does this kind of phenomenon only happen in societies that wallow in superstition? If it is a message from God, as some believe, why won’t God use the opportunity to send a definitive manual of life?

The Enlightenment instituted the culture of demanding empirical proof before believing. If a woman comes into the church and gives birth to a dead horse, you don’t clean up the floor and bury the horse. You send the horse to the lab and the woman to the hospital- mental and/or medical.

Every religion that comes begets a one. Two hundred years from now the people that will occupy this world will look at our era and our religions that we fight for and die for and call our age the Extreme Dark Ages. In another two hundred thousand years, nobody will remember what god we fought for, killed for, or died for. Just like we have no idea what god the people who were on this earth 100,000 years ago fought for, killed for or died for.

It is hard to imagine it now, but after the Third World War and after a nuclear war, a world will emerge with new religions. The old religions left standing will go through reformation. And subtly and gradually, new religions will replace the old. Because it takes hundreds of years for this kind of transformation to be visible, it is hard for those living in that age to notice the change as it happens. We won’t wake up one day and notice that our religion is dead.

It is hard to live without the concept of God because it is hard to live without an answer to the original questions, even if it is not definitive. That is why many will stick with their religion as if it is their parents. Virtually all religions place God beyond reach- at times above the sky. Do you know why? If God is within reach, God will suffer the fate of all parents – be critiqued and be seen to have fallen short.

The trouble with religion is that for every religion to survive and gain members and fend off competitions, it has to proclaim itself to be better than the others. That my religion is better than yours is like saying that my moon is better than yours. That my God is better than yours is to say that my sun is better than yours.

To be willing to fight for your God- which is to say, kill and die for your God, is like to climb on top of each other to pull the moon until it stands still on your side of the sky. It may sound stupid but it has been done before and continues to be done.

Those who worshipped the Greek gods used to believe that they had the final answer. Those who worshipped Oduduwa used to think that their story of the creation was the ultimate. The highest level of human stupidity is the belief that our religion is the final answer to these original questions- who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? Who made me? The arrogance of that assumption has no equal in human folly.

Religions come and go but the earth remains the same. Until we know the definitive truth about the very beginning; and until we answer the original questions without a doubt, religion will remain attractive. But religion will continue to promise us that we find the answers only when we die. Science is the only one trying to find answers to these questions while we are still alive. And science is the only one trying to get to the very beginning and empirically show it to us for the very first time. It may take science one million years to get there. But I am rooting for science not religion.

Beautiful. Even though i disagree with some of your Points. This is an A+ post.

I want Religion to have a natural, gradual Death. It will be madness if religion has an abrupt end, it will be almost apocalyptic. There are still some weak minded individuals that base their Morals on the Ancient books, and they feel that without a god, they can't be moral .

Logicboy03:


Religion will exist but its importance will be severely diminished


To hell with religion.

Dear God, can you give me a long life so that I can see how you slowly die in the future when onlythe mentally challenged and outcasts believe in you?

dats wat i'm trying to say,cos influence of religion will be diminished in country like nigeria where almost every political decision revolve around religion and tribe.in d west religion might be extinct by 2041 but in africa i doubt it i hope it dies quickly most esp in nigeria in order to give way for science.