Opinion (Jason Palmer, Science and technology reporter, BBC News): “A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers. The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation….

“The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one. The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

“The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

“’In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion’…The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the ‘non-religious’ category.

“They found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them.

And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction….

“Obviously we don’t really believe this is the network structure of a modern society, where each person is influenced equally by all the other people in society,” Dr Wiener said.

“However, he told BBC News that he thought it was ‘a suggestive result.’

“’It’s interesting that a fairly simple model captures the data, and if those simple ideas are correct, it suggests where this might be going.’

“’Obviously much more complicated things are going on with any one individual, but maybe a lot of that averages out.’”

My Comment: Since we are in a dynamic process of the continuous growth of egoism in us, a person constantly asks himself how this or that behavior is profitable for him, and if his egoism finds no benefit for itself, then this behavior is rejected. Thus, we always choose (sort) new actions, goals, environment, etc.

Once, our egoism brought us into religion, but today it has outgrown it and takes us from beliefs not supported by reality. It requires proof, and if there is none, it cannot hold itself in obedience without an apparent benefit for itself. That is why all religions will die out and will be replaced by cultures. In essence, even today, every religion is mostly the culture of this or that nation, its customs, but not faith.
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