Only way to complete get rid of all the religions includes mass murders. So it won't happen.

Well theres another way, it includes evolution. We should one day evolve to the point when religion is useless for everyone. But it will take a long long time.

Religion has been with man as long as rats. So far we haven't found an effective way to be rid of either. Even if there was complete proof of all scientific theories and we could show every unknown possibility, there would still be religion. Stupidity knows no bounds. A movie called Idiocracy was a view into how stupid people will inherit the Earth. Stupid people in the movie mutliply faster than intelligent ones. After debates with some theists it's fairly clear they will cling to their myths as long as they live and indoctrinate their children. Our efforts may help reduce the numbers, but they will still be here for years to come.

Well, maybe i used term "evolve" not the way i should.

I assume that there are three types of people: atheists, indoctrinated atheists and fanatics.

Being theist has absolutely no darwinistic explanation. Because it does not give any advantage.

So i must assume that fanatics are mentally ill.

Indoctrinated atheists in a non-religious society would become atheists.

And atheist are atheists already.

So for absolute extinction of religion fanatics needs to be cured or evolve in some way. But because being fanatic has no disadvantage, the same as being atheist has no advantage, so neither has advantage over another. That means you are right about the unforeseen event of some kind.

Hmm, that makes you think.

Or we need to take over the authority and make fanatics go away for good.

I see that too, but i just can't find any. Please anyone do, i really want to know.

I see religion sticking around in some form--probably a very different form than now--for some time.

Hold on, suppose you lived in the USA in 1850. You might be opposed to slavery, but you would say it's been around forever, there is too much incentive to keep it going. So rational person might say it would be around for thousands of years more. But things changed  pretty rapidly, unfortunately it took a major war for the change to occur.

I'm not sure religion could go down without a big war. We're sort of in war now with this Christian society vs. Islamic society. If this war ramped up into a global conflagration, it's hard to imagine a peaceful resolution to this conflict without the world being much less religious.

But, look at Europe, it is largely becoming less religious, only culturally Christian(except for the Islamic immigrants). This change is largely peaceful. Unfortunately, the religious people have a much higher birth rate. I would say that religious people have a higher birthrate, probably because they have more confidence in the future. Non-religious need to come up with a better alternative to religion that gives people self-confidence. If this happens, religion would be dead.

The evolutionary disadvantages would be that irrational religious societies would do more environmental damage, have more poverty, less technical advances to improve survival and create more wars(like Bush did). I think this would argue for nonreligious people segregating themselves from the religious, instead of trying to get along with them and letting them drag everyone down.

  World wide communication is the key, and would make leaps and bounds to muting religion,  if all were made available to Rational Debate, Science etc .....

About evolution ..... Evolution is a process that is not exactly 100% mindless, is it ?, in the sense that it is an active process "effort" of some sort .... the winner being life and so a higer consciousness ???  .....

A desire ? Springing from what and how ? 

In other words, I don't believe in accidents, nor a plan , or a beginning or an end, or a purpose. But I think evolution has a quality of something caring and fighting to survive,  as I , even on a molecular level to some measurable degree, not yet fully known nor understood ???? 

Okay , evolution is nearly mindless , that I agree .... but little things add up to bigger things. The beginning of life on earth ???  No No,  the evolution of life on earth ..... no beginning, no purpose, but not exactly mindless ! ???   

Some call it god and then invent silly dogmas ..... Is a tree conscious to any teensy degree ???  

I don't fucking know !  What Am I , an Atheist theist ?  Ummm, just a nut case in ....  awe !    GAWED, I AM !       

.... but anyway, with upcoming improved world communication, I AM quite certain that Religion, as we know it, will be nearly mute in a relatively near future, 500 yrs ?

well as long as the aliens don't start playing tricks on us, or some other crazy things like massive unending earth quakes and world panic etc.  ....  Hey, keep "praying" and a hoping !  Visit the other galaxies !  Hell, create a better cosmos !      So many suffer worse than I .... from GAWED delusion !

Could you give me a link to this article. It would be interesting to read it.

I've been trying to find it, haven't had any luck yet. I remember reading about it a few years back in newsweek or time and I figured that there was a journal article behind it though its looking like it may have possibly been a book. There's a more recent article on the subject of a biological basis for religious experience that I found on CNN, but as far as the evolutionary article goes I'm not having any luck. If you feel like wasting hours pouring through the newsweek/time archives you'd probably find the article (and thus the source for the original work on the subject) that I'm talking about, and maybe even an EBSCOhost search would turn up results (though when I tried searching I got thousands of results of crap).

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/04/04/neurotheology/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotheology

Something interesting to point out from the wikipedia entry is this paragraph:

"Newberg et al describe neurological processes which are driven by the repetitive, rhythmic stimulation which is typical of human ritual, and which contribute to the delivery of transcendental feelings of connection to a universal unity. They posit, however, that physical stimulation alone is not sufficient to generate transcendental unitive experiences. For this to occur they say there must be a blending of the rhythmic stimulation with ideas. Once this occurs '…ritual turns a meaningful idea into a visceral experience.'"

In other words doing any kind of repetitive action (chanting, rocking back and forth while praying, etc.) combined with the belief that what you're doing is spiritual will cause you to have a religious experience.

I wish I could travel to the future just to see the planet earth full of Atheist as they laugh at all the theist who ever lived in what would be the past to them. Now that would be a true heaven, lol. Like I said I only give it 500-600 years!!!

Slimm,

Allow me to enter this discussion (yes, I have read all the previous posts as well as the OP)

In my experience regarding these sorts of things, its important not to be a starry-eyed optimist. It is perhaps just as important not to be overly fatalistic. If you all don't mind, I am going to try and steer away from the discussion about biological evolution, for several reasons:

1. In case it has escaped the attention of any one of you, humans are the most biologically complex creatures on the planet. Any behaivoural/neurological patterns that influence certain beliefs as being innate, or, as they say in evolutionary psychology, "programmed" will be the result of long and complex processes that take a rather long time. A "rather long time" is about five orders of magnitude greater than the human life span.

2. Because of this, virtually every "change" in human behaivour patterns since the first of our species walked the Earth cannot be put down to genetics. This does not mean that evolution has "stopped". Far from it. There have been many changes throughout the human course of events. Resistance to malaria, the gene encoding lactose, etc. However, by "changes" I am not referring to simple physiological changes which are to be expected within such time spans, and tend to proliferate locally. I mean behaivoral changes. The analogy which I am going to borrow from Ronald Wright is that we are running mental hardware which has not been seriously updated for hundreds of thousands of years on 21st century software. That is to say, if we were to take a Paleolithic child from a campfire, and raise him in our society, he/she would stand an even chance of earning a degree in physics or computer science.

3. Anyone who is familiar with the human career knows it can be divided, basically, into two parts. Everything before the Neolithic revolution, and everything after it. The stone age technology called farming is the technology upon which the entire human endeavour has since been built. With the exception of weapons that can kill us all, the invention of farming has had more impact than anything else we have ever concieved. After the Neolithic revolution, civilizations, beginning in the Fertile Crescent (Babylon (Iraq)), Sumer (collectively under Mesopotamia) China, and India. People are often very startled when I tell them that the entire human endeavour of organized culture and civilization spans approximately 300 generations. Before that, the human career prior to the Neolithic revolution began, spans a deep abyss of time, 99.7% of the human existence. During this time we lived in roving bands, mostly kin. I would estimate that there were fewer than 200,000 humans on the ground for much of this point, all that stood between today and evolutionary failure.

4. Considering this information collectively, it is important to realize that when we speak of programmed traits, we generally refer to traits that were shaped during the longest part of our prehistory, {see above}. The human experiment in civilized existence does not run deep, but it runs wide, for it naturally allows for an enormous population amplification. Because of this, assessing the impact of programmed traits, or changes in programmed traits is extremely dubious. Biological evolution is slow. Human cultural evolution is fast. Because of such rather conspicuous things as global civilization and so forth, it is extremely difficult to assess the interplay of human cultural evolution with our programming, because in the advent of civilization, there have been a very large number of us produced by the timespan has been very short. Biological changes that may occur in humans during this extremely short time period will be offset, and easily beaten, by cultural changes. The analogy I like to use is the vaccine. The eradication of smallpox, after all, did not come because of natural selection resulting in the survival of only those with innate immunity. It came because we got rid of it. 

What I am trying to say is that we are rather plastic creatures in terms of our neurology. The advent of civilization is testimony to that. The effects of biological evolution, or indeed, even any pre-existing innateness to do such and such a behaivour are too slow and too easy to shift. My rule of thumb with respect to human behaivour is that its degree of being ingrained is inversely proportional to its complexity. Some that is physiologically universal such as sex is so deeply ingrained that the biological impulses have more or less withstood every cultural more pertaining to it. Everywhere, everytime, from Puritans to hedonists, people have had sex. On the other hand, something like religion or reason etc. etc. is to a much greater degree determined by environs. Clearly it cannot be true to say that we have, for example, a propensity towards religiosity to the same degree that we have one towards sex, or anger, or hunger, etc. Even very complex traits such as language are far more universal, since that example in particular is completely universal.

Ultimately, what this means is that assessing whether or not religion will "always be with us" or will not, or anything else that may pertain to its future, cannot be assessed in terms of complex underlying behaivours in humans and associated biology, or in terms of evolutionary pyschology. Nor can it be assessed in terms of innateness or lack thereof. Being that these biological impulses are not underlying or ingrained to the same degree that something such as language or sex/hunger/need for oxygen is.

I prefer to assess such a question in the same manner that I would any other institution. I am trying to encourage you to, in this discussion about the survival of religion or lack thereof in the coming years, shed your beliefs that the results will be determined by the underlying biological or pyschological innateness of such beliefs, because the complexity of such ideas is such that, as I have shown above, whatever is ingrained will be very, very plastic. That is to say, in these cases with these very complex mental traits, whatever biological selection that caused whatever form of them being ingrained (I am being vague because evo psych is so speculative) are, in advanced human civilizations, can be changed or reversed altogether when cultural changes shift what constitutes an advantegous mental behaivour. We probably are not going to see, for example, a culture that makes language taboo (how would that even be possible?). But consider the number of cultural changes that have ensured that what constitutes an advantage with respect to less ingrained, more complex behaivours change. The mere existence of complex civilizations with millions of people in them living and working in close proximity requires the shedding of numerous complex, distinct, but ultimately plastic traits that would have proliferated better during the first epoch of the Stone age, that spans approximately 99.7% of human existence. I like to sum this up in a single sentence: "We domesticated the dog biologically. We domesticated ourselves mentally".

Another factor to consider that is unique to our time entirely is that a sufficient understanding of underlying biological impulses and where they come from is more likely to allow the person who carries such knowledge to dispense of associated beliefs, because they know full well that such beliefs are irrational. Consider racism. A person who understands and is well versed in the psychological, biological and evolutionary impulses associated with racism and its relationship to our existence in kins and roving bands, with in group/out group mentality, and its necessity in this environment, is less likely to be racist, since he is likely to catch himself at it and hence understand the irrationality of such beliefs. I'll use myself as an example. I take advantage of modern knowledge to train myself to overcome crowd pyschology. A useful trick to have and know. It makes you almost impossible to con.

Let's return to the point at hand. When asked what I think will happen, to, for example, Christianity, I remind my interlocutor that "Christianity" has existed for approximately 50 generations. Having established that the religion has a very short career in human history, therefore, the notion becomes rather less daunting. Nonetheless, I hope nobody here is going to pretend to be able to confidently assert whether or not religion will be completely gone in 500 years or so. Its hard to say. I try not to be overly optimistic about such things, but I simultaneously (for reasons outlined) reject the idea that religion will stay with us for all time because of underlying biological and pyschological ingraining. I realize that to whomever has just finished reading this post, I have led you all this way not to give you a concrete answer on my opinion on whether religion will ever go away (to make you feel better, I'll say that I think it will, but I won't say anything concrete). But I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless.

PS Hamby. You are correct. Idiocracy was not funny. The only intelligent thing that was said was in the opening voice-over about evolution.

Yes, Islam is kind of spread by the sword and high birth rates. So maybe this would be a case of the most violent ideology subjecting the timid ones though murder and intimidation. Plus you have socialism in Europe so the non-Muslims are actually going to take care of the Muslims with large families. So the non-Muslims are committing cultural suicide.

But, the problem is with modern technology. Sam Harris pointed out how insane it is that in the Islamic world, you have Engineers with the technical education and scientific reasoning to build a nuclear weapon, yet they still hold religious beliefs about getting 72 virgins. This kind of dangerous mix will lead to global conflagrations kill millions. Muslims will not be spared. Look at how the Sunni and Shia sects murder each other.

So if Islam did become the predominant world religion, the resultiing wars and poverty would be so bad that only a much less religious world could end the conflicts.