Why Atheism Will Replace Religion: The Triumph of Earthly Pleasures over Pie in the Sky

by Nigel Barber, Ph.D. ASIN: B00886ZSJ6 (Amazon Kindle ebook, 2012) Review by Mark Plus
some day. Many philosophers in the 18th Century Enlightenment speculated about this possibility, both informally and through the often clandestine literature they published. In our lifetimes the Star Trek franchise popularized the idea of a future society which doesnt seem to have much need for a god, though the various Trek series and films promoted the message more through example than by precept. Ive joked that the increasing visibility of atheists in the U.S. apparently gives some Christians in this country the creeps because we look like an invasion of time travelers from the 22nd Century or something; the absence of god beliefs in our lives suggests that Christianity might not have much of a future. People in Western culture understand on some level that obsessive religiosity seems less compatible with an economically progressive world than with a stagnant, impoverished one. Nigel Barber, a psychologist who writes The Human Beast blog on the website of P s y c h o l o g y T o d a y ma g a z i n e ( h t t p : / / www.p sychologytod ay.co m/b log/the-human-beast) argues in his ebook that the atheistic time travelers could have come from as early as the 2030s instead, a decade which also figured in the speculations about t h e f u t u r e b y t h e t r a n s h u m a n i s t a n d cryonicist FM-2030. FM asserted that religion would decline substantially by that decade, though unlike Barber he didnt supply data or construct extrapolations to argue for his case. (Refer to FMs book Are You a Transhuman?) Barber synthesizes a lot of material from anthropology, history, social psychology, sociology, demography and other disciplines to argue the following theses: 1. Religion arose as a strategy to manage existential anxiety. (Barber assumes that the supernatural things and forces which religionists talk to dont exist.) 2.Human development through economic growth, education, healthcare

ldous Huxley in his science fiction novel Brave New World, a story about a secular-humanist utopia set in a time several centuries from now, seems to have anticipated the decline of religious beliefs and practices we have seen in developed countries in recent years, a trend which has generated much scholarly investigation into its causes. In Chapter 17 of that no v e l , t he W o r l d Co n t r o l l e r M us t a p ha Mond reads from his collection of old forbidden books a couple of passages by philosophers which supposedly explain the religious sentiment in man as he realizes his existential vulnerability. Mond then says : One of the numerous things in heaven a n d e a r th th a t th e s e p hi lo so p he r s didnt dream about was this (he waved his hand), us, the modern world. You can only be independent of God while youve got youth and prosperity; independence wont take you safely to the end. Well, weve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses. But there arent any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order? Huxley, a well-read intellectual who kept abreast of scientific developments in his time, knew that our culture has the idea dating from at least the late 17th Century that religion stands on shaky ground and that progress in alleviating the human condition could make religion much less important SO CI E T Y F OR V E N T U RI SM

and democratic government in many countries has made people less existentially anxious, so they lose interest in religion and over the following generations more and more people identify themselves as nonbelievers. This can happen in even one generation, as we have seen in Ireland. The process in a country seems to start when its per capita GDP reaches $10,000 a year. 3. By contrast, a high level of religiosity in a country signals poor living condit i o ns . 4. The U.S. may seem anomalously religious for a developed and wealthy country, but Barber says that much of the religiosity reflects social pressures to over-report church attendance. He attributes the hard core religious belief t o o ur in e q u a li t y wh ic h ma ke s nonwealthy Americans insecure. Atheism shows signs of growth in the U.S. regardless, especially among the young who can search the internet for alternative points of view about religious beliefs and use social media to find people with similar doubts and questions about religion. They have also grown up with more liberal attitudes towards sexuality, so the churches which take harsh stances against premarital sex, contraception and homosexuality turn them off. N E W S AN D V I E WS JU N E - JU L Y 20 1 2

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5 . S p o r t s , e n t e r t a i n me n t , p s yc h o therapy and social media provide people with emotionally fulfilling ways of managing anxiety which replace religious observances. However anxieties about status and popularity have replaced anxieties about survival, and traditional religions generally lack doctrines for addressing those needs because they emphasize humility instead of pride and narcissism. 6. Barber argues that we have the tools from statistics and the social sciences to construct models to predict when a nation will undergo a kind of atheistic transition where the percentage of religious believers drops to 50 percent. Using several different scenarios, he comes up with several dates in the 2030-2040 window for a worldwide transition to an atheist majority, assuming that the poorer countries can continue to develop economically and benefit from decent governments. 7. If these atheized countries turn out like Western European countries on average, they would produce acceptable living conditions for every member of our species for the first time in its history, and religion as weve known it would pretty much go away. We would have real pies on the table instead of promised pies in some imaginary hereafter. Of course Barber admits that the world has entered uncharted territory, metaphorically speaking. The experiences of secular European countries, along with Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and to a lesser extent the U.S., may not scale up or replicate well in other cultures. Social democracy in Europe might collapse because of financial unsustainability, and Europeans might become more religious again. Economic growth might fail for other reasons like technological stagnation or resource constraints, as Peter Thiel has argued lately. Yet many people think we live in a kind of end times, which some Christians predict will start with their supernatural evacuation from Earth in an event they call the rapture. Barber says that, yes, Christians will disappear, all right, but not because something supernatural happens to them. Atheists will replace them organically, and SO CI E T Y F OR V E N T U RI SM

barring a catastrophe, godless people will continue to go about their business and enjoy satisfactory lives in the coming Jesus who? era without noticing religions abs en ce . I wanted to like this ebook more, but Barber padded it and it reads repetitiously. It really has enough material for about the size of two New Yorker articles instead of a full book. Yet for an affordable $3.99 it still deserves a download to your Kindle because Barber pulls together a lot of information to make his case that a predominantly godless society doesnt lie in some distant science fiction-like era, but more likely within many of our pre-cryosuspension lifetimes. Assuming that Barbers forecast gets it right for the state of religion in the 2030s and beyond, what does it portend for the social environment in which the cryonics movement has to operate? If much of the worlds population transitions to a state where they no longer die from the preventable diseases, privations and misadventures which lead to religiosity as anxiety management, but instead die mainly from the diseases of aging, they might lose interest in religion per se, but Barber acknowledges that existential questions will remain. Would this trend make people more inclined to seek out scientific ways to conquer aging and death, and therefore result in mainstream social acceptance of cryonic suspension, the chemical preservation of the brain and other life-extension experiments with unknown outcomes?

A BRIEF COMMENT by Mike Perry Barber clearly makes a sharp distinction between atheism and religion as if the two are opposite poles. Religion appears to be almost synonymous with theistic religion which may apply broadly in the world today, particularly in the West, but I think the concept reasonably has a broader base than that. Paul Tillich, the liberal Protestant 20th-Century theologian, appears to have had this in mind when he defined religion as the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life. (See Paul Tillich, Ch ri st i a n i t y a n d t h e E n c o u n t e r o f t h e Wo r ld s R e l ig io n s, C h. 1 , h ttp : // www.religion-online.org/ showchapter.asp?title= 1557&C=1389, accessed 05 Jul. 2012.) On this basis it would not be essential to believe in the sort of deity that traditional Christianity has advocated to be considered religious and to have a religion. One might even consider onself atheist and still also religious, if, for example, one did not abandon hopes of life after clinical death but pinned those hopes on some sort of future technological capability, as in cryonics, and had certain other attitudes about the value and purpose of life and the need to further the cause of living a good life. (The Venturist organization was set up with these very prospects in mind.) In any case, religious establishments have proved themselves adaptable, even as the human needs they address have at least in part proved highly durable. So I dont think religion in some broad sense will easily or quickly disappear, but may take on new forms to suit the realities of the times as the future unfolds.

T he a nn ua l ga t h e r i n g o f t he g r o up o f cryonicists organized by Cairn Idun and devoted to OSSLAPoptions for safe, secure, and legal asset preservationtook place Jun. 8-10 at the Embassy Suites Hotel, Ontario, CA. Four Venturist board members attended the invitation-only get-together: David Pizer, Mark Voelker, Ben Best, and Mike Perry. More details should appear so o n .

ASSET PRESERVATION GROUP MEETING

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