Atheists: Why do so many of you ignore actual research and insist that religions are shrinking globally?

Religion can grow as much as it wants.

That suddenly doesn't make a fable true.

Those are projections.

From 1990 to 2012 my 200 or so co-workers were all holders of science, arts or engineering degrees and they were nominally Orthodox, Coptic, Catholic, Protestant, Sikh, Muslim and Hindu. While I cannot claim to know them all, religiosity was pretty scarce among the ones I did know.

Tertiary education may or may not encourage skepticism, but it does show persons how to find things they do not know. In ten minutes I can check some the claims of the religious against fact on unbiased web sites.

Ten or more years ago this would have taken a visit to a library and digging through various reference books, and sometimes the library didn't have the books and there might be a week's wait before you got it.

The religious make a lot of claims which are easily checked and many are dubious and sometimes false. Fact checking, which is something that good journalists did routinely is the death of religion.

Allow me to give you a good example. A few years ago Pastor Rick Joyner claimed on YouTube that he was in Amsterdam when a "demonic" and unforecast storm blew up, with the effect of killing dozens of people in Amsterdam and neighbouring countries including England and Scotland across the North Sea.

Unfortunately, while there was a severe storm, it had been forecast and tracked, precautions were taken so the only death in Amsterdam was a woman killed by a falling tree branch. There were more fatalities in a later storm which happened months AFTER the video was posted.

Joyner was lying about it and using the Great Storm of 1953 as his model. In 1953 he was only a few years old.

I think either you are taking what some atheists have said out of context, or possibly that the atheists in question are misunderstanding the actual trends. While religion isn't going away, much as many of us might wish it would, it is worth noting that religion IS actually fading away in the developed, modern, and affluent world. If you look at the statistics for North America, most of Europe and much of Asia and Oceana (if you'll allow the use of the term), I think you will see that religion is fading out. The only areas where religion seems to actually be spreading (and actually, it is simply a case of newer religions replacing older ones), is in the Southern hemisphere.

It's all cultural really, Atheism was once the state "religion" of the Soviet Union and religions were mocked. China is officially Atheist, and many other communist countries. When you go back in time, France was overwhelmingly Atheist during the revolution. So really, it's not based on anything new. It's all just humanity's persistent desire for something new that is immensely old.

Who gives a crap? I know I don't.

>>However, not a day goes by on Y!A in which several Atheists (in an attempt to imply the superiority of their ideas over those of the religious) claim that religion will soon be extinct and is shrinking every day. <<

That's not true. I'm here every day and I can't remember the last time an atheist made that claim.

Statistics are fun and all, but they do not show a complete picture.

Religious people in Western democracies aren't as religious as people were 100 years ago on average nor as religious as modern people in the third world. As education and standards of living rise, religion is far less important to people compared to modern medicine, for example.

The number of people in the West who are affiliated with specific religious groups is falling -- "I'm spiritual, but not religious" is the mantra. Most people nominally identify as whatever religion they were raised as, but studies of religious knowledge consistently show that religious people do not know the tenets of their religion as well as they think that they do.

As the numbers of those people identifying as no particular religion rise, you will witness the demise of the religions that exist today. The institutions that provide religious instruction will wither and each successive generation will fall further and further from orthodoxy until there is nothing left. Nothing is really going to stop that short of a global apocalypse that would put our species back in the stone age to try again.

You're just going to wake up one morning within 40 years or so and no one will care about specific religions anymore. And just following the statistics, you'll never see it coming. It's likely people will still be calling themselves Christian, Muslim, etc...long after there cease to be any meaning to those terms, in the same way various groups in the US celebrate their ancestors ethnic heritage -- for example, the most vehement Italian-American today has little in common culturally with an actual Italian. Religion will become a relic of a previous culture.

Islam is on an inexorable course to become the world's dominant belief system by mid-century and is currently fastest growing belief system in terms of sheer numbers. Atheism and other forms of irreligion will continue to grow in some regions, but are unlikely to become a majority in most parts of the world. Additionally, not all irreligious people are atheists. Atheism is only a specific kind irreligion and does not represent the majority of irreligious people.

Atheism or those who check no religion has gone from about 10% to over 30% where do they come from, more magic? Some group has to shrink.

Atheism is on the rise, albeit a slow rise. Atheists as a percentage of the general population is still a minority. But they are gaining at the expense of believers. I don't think atheism will become a majority anytime soon. I think it may take a few centuries.

Religion is expanding in third world countries. The Vatican has targeted Africa and South America. But the numbers in Western countries has been continually shrinking, just look at the diminishing church attendance.

What you're seeing when you think you see religions growing, is the last, desperate spasm of activity before the inevitable decline. It has nothing to do with "the superiority" of atheist ideas, it's just what happens as people become more educated, more globally connected and gain more access to information. You're so invested in building atheist straw men that you've missed the bigger picture.