Christianity 'could die out within a century'

"Research by the Orthodox Jewish organisation Aish found that just over a third of people thought religions like Christianity and Judaism would still be practiced in Britain in 100 years' time.
Although four in 10 people said they would choose to be a member of the Christian religion, almost the same number said they would rather practice no religion at all.
Buddhism however, proved more attractive than both Islam and Judaism, and was chosen by nine per cent of those questioned.
Aish UK's executive director Rabbi Naftali Schiff said the results of the YouGov poll of 2,000 people were alarming.
"It clearly demonstrates that religion, including Judaism, is becoming unattractive to the British public."

[...]

Research published earlier this year suggested that church attendance is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation.
According to Religious Trends, an analysis of religious practice in Britain, the huge drop off in attendance means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially unviable.
In contrast, the number of actively religious Muslims is predicted to increase from about one million today to 1.96 million in 2035.

Telegraph.co.uk, 20/06/2008

No cause for alarm!
And for the panic mongers, this will definitely affect Islam too. Practising Muslims prefer to live in religious countries, even if they are Christian, and probably for good reasons.

His Atheist Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

"I'm Buddhist, I'm a Buddhist practitioner. So actually I think that according to nontheistic Buddhist belief, things are due to causes and conditions. No creator. So I have faith in our actions, not prayer. Action is important. Action is karma. Karma means action. That's an ancient Indian thought. In nontheistic religions, including Buddhism, the emphasis is on our actions rather than god or Buddha. So some people say that Buddhism is a kind of atheism. Some scholars say that Buddhism is not a religion — it's a science of the mind.

Do you agree with that?

Oh, yes. I even consider Buddha and some of his important followers like Nagarjuna (one of Buddha's leading disciples) to be scientists. Their main method is analytical. Analyze, analyze — not emphasis on faith. And these masters are not magicians. (Jokingly pretends to clip me around the head and laughs.)"

Japan Times, Sunday, December 02, 2007

1 per cent of Germans think Islam is most peaceful religion

"A study carried out for the news magazine Der Spiegel showed that 44 per cent of those questioned saw the Tibetan spiritual and secular leader as a role model, while only 42 per cent attributed the same qualities to the pope.
The Dalai Lama enjoyed a particularly high popularity rating among the young and better educated, according to the survey by the TNS research organization.

[...]

Asked what they thought was the "most peaceful religion," 43 per cent opted for Buddhism, while 41 per cent chose Christianity. Only 1 per cent picked Islam."

dw-world.de, 14.07.2007

Religion losing its allure in Australia

"Since 2001, the number of people [in Australia] saying they have no religious conviction has risen from 2.9 million, or 15.5 per cent of the population to 3.7 million, or 19 per cent.

So, over a period during which the total population has grown by just under a million, the number of non-believers has risen by 800,000. Which means the percentage increase of non-believers is close to 30 per cent.

Conversely, the percentage affirming commitment to some form of Christianity has hardly fallen – from 54 per cent to 53.2. In numerical terms, the overall number of Christians has declined from 10,768,000 to 10,577,000 – hardly cause for the bishops to sweat.

However, when the population is increasing, it's difficult to deny the emergence of a trend towards decline – and if the trend were to continue, as it has over the past three census periods, Christians will a minority very soon.

Those who fear that as Christianity declines, other religions will gain new adherents need not do so. In the past five years, the percentage of Australians claiming belief in "other" religions – Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and so on – has also slipped – from 30.5 per cent to 28.1 per cent.

[...]

So it seems beyond dispute that, rather than cleaving to "new" religions offering new alleged truths and insights and rather than falling back on the age-old shibboleths of "traditional" Abrahamic religions, increasing numbers of Australians are rejecting religion altogether."

Daily Telegraph (Australia), July 03, 2007

[Survey] Is There Disdain For Evangelicals In the Classroom?

"Tobin asked professors at all kinds of colleges -- public and private, secular and religious, two-year and four-year -- to rate their feelings toward various religious groups, from very warm or favorable to very cool or unfavorable. He said he designed the question primarily to gauge anti-Semitism but found that professors expressed positive feelings toward Jews, Buddhists, Roman Catholics and most other religious groups.

The only groups that elicited highly negative responses were evangelical Christians and Mormons.

[...]

Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the unfavorable feelings toward evangelical Christians probably have two causes: "the particular kind of Republican Party activism that some evangelicals have engaged in over the years, as well as what faculty perceive as the opposition to scientific objectivity among some evangelicals.""

Washington Post, May 5, 2007

A whining article (In the Moonie-owned Washington Post), but interesting nevertheless. It seems being anti-science does not give Evangelicals much credit in classrooms. Probably as little credit as science get in their churches.

[Stats] Why the gods are not winning

"A myth is gaining ground. The myth seems plausible enough. The proposition is that after God died in the secular 20th century, He is back in a big way as people around the world again find faith. [...]

The evangelical authors of the WCE lament that no Christian "in 1900 expected the massive defections from Christianity that subsequently took place in Western Europe due to secularism…. and in the Americas due to materialism…. The number of nonreligionists…. throughout the 20th century has skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900, to 697 million in 1970, and on to 918 million in AD 2000…. Equally startling has been the meteoritic growth of secularism…. Two immense quasi-religious systems have emerged at the expense of the world's religions: agnosticism…. and atheism…. From a miniscule presence in 1900, a mere 0.2% of the globe, these systems…. are today expanding at the extraordinary rate of 8.5 million new converts each year, and are likely to reach one billion adherents soon. A large percentage of their members are the children, grandchildren or the great-great-grandchildren of persons who in their lifetimes were practicing Christians""

edge.org May 1 , 2007