As scepticism and materialism replace blind faith, more people than ever worldwide are opting for atheism, argues Conservative Humanists patron Matt Ridley.
Fifty years ago, after the cracking of the genetic code, Francis Crick was so confident religion would fade that he offered a prize for the best future use for Cambridge’s college chapels. Swimming pools, said the winning entry. Today, when terrorists cry ‘God is great’ in both Paris and Bamako as they murder, the joke seems sour. But here’s a thought: that jihadism may be a last spasm — albeit a painful one — of a snake that is being scotched. The humanists are winning, even against Islam.
Quietly, non-belief is on the march. Those who use an extreme form of religion to poison the minds of disaffected young men are furious about the spread of materialist and secularist ideas, which they feel powerless to prevent. In 50 years’ time, we may look back on this period and wonder how we failed to notice that Islam was about to lose market share, not to other religions, but to Humanism.
The fastest growing belief system in the world is non-belief. No religion grew nearly as fast over the past century. Whereas virtually nobody identified as a non-believer in 1900, today roughly 15 per cent do, and that number does not include soft Anglicans in Britain, mild Taoists in China, lukewarm Hindus in India or token Buddhists in Japan. Even so, the non-religious category has overtaken paganism, will soon pass Hinduism, may one day equal Islam and is gaining on Christianity. (Of every ten people in the world, roughly three are Christian, two Muslim, two Hindu, 1.5 non-religious and 1.5 something else.)
This is all the more remarkable when you think that, with a few notable exceptions, atheists or humanists don’t preach, let alone pour money into evangelism. Their growth has come almost entirely from voluntary conversion, whereas Islam’s slower growth in market share has largely come from demography: the high birth rates in Muslim countries compared with Christian ones.
And this is about to change. The birth rate in Muslim countries is plummeting at unprecedented speed. A study by the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt three years ago found that: ‘Six of the ten largest absolute declines in fertility for a two-decade period recorded in the postwar era have occurred in Muslim-majority countries.’ Iran, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Libya, Albania, Qatar and Kuwait have all seen birth-rate declines of more than 60 per cent in 30 years.
Meanwhile, secularism is on the rise within Muslim majority countries. It is not easy being a humanist in an Islamic society, even outside the Isis hell-holes, so it is hard to know how many there are. But a poll in 2012 found that 5 per cent of Saudis describe themselves as fully atheist and 19 per cent as non-believers — more than in Italy. In Lebanon the proportion is 37 per cent. Remember in many countries they are breaking the law by even thinking like this.
That Arab governments criminalise non-belief shows evidence not of confidence, but of alarm. Last week a court in Saudi Arabia sentenced a Palestinian poet, Ashraf Fayadh, to death for apostasy. In 2014 the Saudi government brought in a law defining atheism as a terrorist offence. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government in Egypt, though tough on Islamists, has also ordered two ministries to produce a national plan to ‘confront and eliminate’ atheism. They have shut down a café frequented by atheists and dismissed a college librarian who talked about Humanism in a TV programme.
Earlier this month there was yet another murder by Islamists — the fifth such incident — of a Bangladeshi publisher of secularist writing. I recently met one of the astonishingly brave humanist bloggers of Bangladesh, Arif Rahman, who has seen four colleagues hacked to death with machetes in daylight. He told me about Bangladesh’s 2013 blasphemy law, and the increasing indifference or even hostility of the Bangladeshi government towards the plight of non-religious bloggers. For many Muslim-dominated governments, the enemy is not ‘crusader’ Christianity, it is home-grown non-belief.
The jihadists of Isis are probably motivated less by a desire to convert Europe’s disaffected youth to fundamentalist Islam than by a wish to prevent the Muslim diaspora sliding into western secularism. In the Arab world, according to Brian Whitaker, author of Arabs Without God, what tempts people to leave the faith is not disgust at the antics of Islamist terrorists, but the same things that have drained church attendance here: materialism, rationalism and scepticism.
As the academics Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman wrote in an essay eight years ago: ‘Not a single advanced democracy that enjoys benign, progressive socio-economic conditions retains a high level of popular religiosity. They all go material.’ America is no longer much of an exception. Non-believers there outnumber Mormons, Muslims and Jews combined, and are growing faster than southern Baptists.
Whitaker found that Arab atheists mostly lost their faith gradually, as the unfairness of divine justice, the irrationality of the teaching, or the prejudice against women, gay people or those of other faiths began to bother them. Whatever your origin and however well you have been brainwashed, there is just something about living in a society with restaurants and mobile phones, universities and social media, that makes it hard to go on thinking that morality derives exclusively from superstition.
Not that western humanists are immune from superstitions, of course: from Gaia to Gwyneth Paltrow diets to astrology, there’s plenty of room for cults in the western world, though they are mostly harmless. As is Christianity, these days, on the whole.
I do not mean to sound complacent about the Enlightenment. The adoption of Sharia or its nearest equivalent in no-go areas of European cities will need to be resisted, and vigorously. The jihadists will kill many more people before they are done, and will provoke reactions by governments that will erode civil liberties along the way. I am dismayed by the sheer lack of interest in defending free speech that many young westerners display these days, as more and more political groups play the blasphemy card in imitation of Islam, demanding ‘safety’ from ‘triggering’ instances of offence.
None the less, don’t lose sight of the big picture. If we hold our resolve, stop the killers, root out the hate preachers, encourage the reformers and stem the tide of militant Islamism, then secularism and milder forms of religion will win in the long run.
Matt Ridley is a journalist and Conservative Party peer who is a member of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group. This piece originally appeared in The Times newspaper.
Human race found cure for HIV and cancers, now is Hope More Humans choose , realistic happy road, and run away from organiased brutal relegions
The cure for all religions is information. The more information people get about the world, the more they will come to see religion as an archaic and backward, and should be relegated to the dark ages from were they were born.
Religions have flourished when on their followers ignorance, were they could tell their flock what they should or should not do. Now that religions can not control the information, religions have been on the decline. As the atheist Thunderfoot correctly stated “The Internet: Were religions come to die”.
I like your thoughts but please correct your spelling. We’re the SMART people out here!
Although not a supporter of the Conservative Party,I concur with the main thrust of the Tory peer’s contention that humanism,reason and the scientific method are making significant inroads into all societies.Nevertheless,as rational human beings,we should not be too complacent. We currently have preposterous scenarios,for instance, where someone can be sentenced to death merely for disputing or even mocking a supernatural concept.This is a medieval barbarism. I always ask myself if those who have passed sentence actually received notification from their deity that such a sentence was just and warranted? I doubt it,as sanctions for religious infractions are invariably made up,often on the hoof!
I grew up in a catholic family and cried my eyes out watching Jesus Christ crucified. Today I look back to those days and laugh aloud at myself. I’m a full blown atheist not by what I have read but by self conviction. Religion in whatever form in my opinion is man’s greatest folly. Only people without imagination believe in religion and gods. I have defined pure religion as a way of life of a people in line with their culture and therefore not universal. What is taboo in my community is not in yours. Religion as universally practiced has caused more conflagration, death and destruction than all other wars put together. If therefore there was a god somewhere, then he must be the biggest joke of the whole world. A day will come when man will discover there is another planet somewhere in not too far away galaxy exactly like ours and with animals, man inclusive who are just like us. The cosmos is unimaginably large for any person to even imagine we are the only form of civilization existing within it. I even believe that within the same space we are now that there are other forms of civilization whose constituent atoms vibrate outside the frequency range any of our instruments can measure. Also environments outside what we believe support life as we know it are capable of supporting other forms of life or civilization probably with higher intelligence. The greatest minds alive today have disputed the idea of God and religion. Einstein, Stephen Hawkins etc. Let humanity wake up. We are still living in the stone age and some of the drawings inscribed on walls of those caves as brought to our attention by Erik Von Daniken still hold no meaning to 99.999% of people on this planet. Thanks.
Is this evidence that “secular humanism” is a prosyletising religion?
Clearly not, seeing as it doesn’t seek to convert anyone and isn’t really analogous with a religion. If you look to the evidence and reject superstition on that basis, and live a good life based on empathy towards your fellow living things, that makes you a humanist. The extent to which that statement is true of you describes the extent to which you can call yourself a humanist.
No more than the Off switch on your TV is a channel…
This article hits the nail firmly on the head. The greatest fear of the proponents of conservative Islam is secularism, because their power base depends entirely on the maintenance of what is, to all intelligent outsiders, ignorant subservience to dogma.
No go areas?? Wut?
Any evidence for these outside of discredited and re-edited blogs?
Yes, plenty of evidence, and on mainstream news outlets. You only have to look.
Link?
Plenty of people recycle the no-go areas myth and if any of them knew anything about the areas they spoke of, they would realise how daft they sound. As someone who lives in one of the alleged ‘muslim no-go areas’, when i hear this nonsense i just switch off as i know i’m just listening to someone who believes anything they read as long as it suites their agenda.
This is coming from an atheist too. Too many closet racists in this movement who make the rest of us look bad.
Religion thrived for centuries because people had no access to information, facts and ideas other than that fed to them by the controlling clergy through word of mouth and heavily edited and censored printed matter. Now the internet lets everyone access information freely and to contact everyone else with ease without theocratic interference. People who would otherwise be isolated can come together in the realisation that there are millions of like minded sceptics and doubters. This global information exchange is undermining the theocracies with ever increasing effectiveness as more and more people throw off the shackles of religion. I believe secularism is nearing the tipping point that will give it unstoppable and overwhelming momentum.
Interesting article Matt. With all that is going on with regards political Islam it is easy to feel despondent but as you point out there are reasons to be optimistic.
Another such reason is The Muslim Reform Movement–check out their web site and declaration—movement in the right direction. However they seem to have had little exposure; perhaps in your role as a journalist and member of the All Party Humanist Group in Parliament you could address this situation.
Best wishes all.
Good article. There is much to be done in mapping the growth of unbelief, particularly in societies where proclaiming it is dangerous. The growth of ‘nones’ in the US is very welcome and the link between religious dominance and societal retardation is well- documented. As the article says, we must be firm against allowing Iron Age superstitions to be privileged and allowed to ignore laws and silence criticism and ridicule. These are the laws of a civilised country: tough. You can’t bring awful ideas with you when you move to another country. That will help stifle the spread.
A long battle to come. But the availability of information has dealt a huge blow to indoctrinators. and we can be hopeful.