Topic: Atheism brougth us nothing good! - page 2. (Read 1829 times)

Atheism seems to thrive in countries where there is a lot of financial freedom and freedom of expression. Being an atheist in a religious third world country will likely sever you from your delicate family support network. In most first world and developing countries, you can get a basic job and have enough money to live on your own and lead your own atheist lifestyle. The exception I suppose would be countries like China or other communist or ex-communist countries where religion had been oppressed.

Atheist always want us to believe that our countries are doing so much better now that people are getting less religious!

But all that i see is:
-more depression and less simple happiness
-more organised crime (done by our governments)
-more rudeness
-more stress

What is your idea on this?

Atheist always want us to believe that our countries are doing so much better now that people are getting less religious!

But all that i see is:
-more depression and less simple happiness
-more organised crime (done by our governments)
-more rudeness
-more stress

What is your idea on this?

Well, I got my info from this Wikipedia page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Denmark
Excerpt from the site:
"According to the 2012 Eurobarometer , 71% of Danish people are Christians (64% are Protestant), 25% are non-religious and 3% are members of other religions."

I did a search on other developed countries on your list still thesame.



I still insist on discouraging Bigotry. If this is done, you may be shocked the numbers of atheist/agnostic in developing countries is higher than thought. The stats could even be thesame everywhere. People are forced to become what they don't want to be in these countries.
County like North Korea and Cuba  identify as athiests but If the freedom is there, the number of Religious people could really be far higher than athiests. You will be surprised that Japanese and South Korea have more Religious people too.

Gallup claims that 52 percent of the Danish population associates as either atheist or non-religious – but this figure is significantly lower than previous surveys that directly asked people whether they were religious.

A survey in 2008, also by Gallup, revealed Denmark to be in the top three least religious countries in the world

Thousands of people have left the Church of Denmark following a nationwide advertising campaign by the country's atheist society.

Between April and June, 10,000 people left the church - the highest number of registered withdrawals since 2007.

You did not conduct such research properly, if at all...

Every country that I listed as primarily atheist has a strong majority of self-identifying atheists living in that country. If there is no religion with a clear majority, I list the religion with plurality first, and the secondary religion second.

If I am wrong, please list the country you disagree with, and the percent you think each religion has in that specific country, and I will update the post if you are correct (which you won't be because I've already checked every country I listed)

Example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Norway

I lump agnostics with atheists... because, they are "soft-atheists" (I similarly lump protestants, catholics, mormons, etc into "christian", so fair is fair)... so with Norway, we have 39% atheist + 27% agnostic = 66% atheist... 37% religious (mostly christian)... If you don't answer "yes" to the question, "do you believe in God?", you are an atheist
As a result of 66% vs 37% is predominantly one-sided, I label Norway as Atheist...

Israel however, is closer to 50%/50%, so I put (Jewish/Atheist) because it is more accurate/honest that way (half of Jewish adherents do not believe in God, which is different from christians/muslims, ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_atheism "A 2011 study found that half of all American Jews have doubts about the existence of God, compared to 10–15% of other American religious groups")

Also note: This is not "my data"... this is an independent international report based on numerous variables that has been conducted for years.  I simply added the predominant religion of each country in parenthesis (), using the most recent data/polling I could find (2016-2017)

Your data is pretty interesting but I don't i think it is very true. I did an Internet search on some of the successful countries on your list, most still identifies as Christians...
The claim that developed Western countries are full of atheists is myth.


Blame Bigotry for bad behaviors not Religion.

According to 2016 data from annual social-cultural study Norwegian Monitor (Norsk Monitor), 39 percent of Norvegians responded with "No" to the question to the question “Do you believe in God?”, while 37 percent said "Yes" and 27 percent said that they did not know.

Right now, the largest number of atheists in the world live in China. And for sure, the living conditions there are much better than that in religious nations such as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Yemen, or Pakistan.

The number of Christians in Communist China is growing so steadily that it by 2030 it could have more churchgoers than America

It is said to be China's biggest church and on Easter Sunday thousands of worshippers will flock to this Asian mega-temple to pledge their allegiance – not to the Communist Party, but to the Cross.

The 5,000-capacity Liushi church, which boasts more than twice as many seats as Westminster Abbey and a 206ft crucifix that can be seen for miles around, opened last year with one theologian declaring it a "miracle that such a small town was able to build such a grand church".

The £8 million building is also one of the most visible symbols of Communist China's breakneck conversion as it evolves into one of the largest Christian congregations on earth.

"It is a wonderful thing to be a follower of Jesus Christ. It gives us great confidence," beamed Jin Hongxin, a 40-year-old visitor who was admiring the golden cross above Liushi's altar in the lead up to Holy Week.

"If everyone in China believed in Jesus then we would have no more need for police stations. There would be no more bad people and therefore no more crime," she added.

Officially, the People's Republic of China is an atheist country but that is changing fast as many of its 1.3 billion citizens seek meaning and spiritual comfort that neither communism nor capitalism seem to have supplied.

Christian congregations in particular have skyrocketed since churches began reopening when Chairman Mao's death in 1976 signalled the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Less than four decades later, some believe China is now poised to become not just the world's number one economy but also its most numerous Christian nation.

"By my calculations China is destined to become the largest Christian country in the world very soon," said Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology at Purdue University and author of Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule.

"It is going to be less than a generation. Not many people are prepared for this dramatic change."

China's Protestant community, which had just one million members in 1949, has already overtaken those of countries more commonly associated with an evangelical boom. In 2010 there were more than 58 million Protestants in China compared to 40 million in Brazil and 36 million in South Africa, according to the Pew Research Centre's Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Prof Yang, a leading expert on religion in China, believes that number will swell to around 160 million by 2025. That would likely put China ahead even of the United States, which had around 159 million Protestants in 2010 but whose congregations are in decline.

By 2030, China's total Christian population, including Catholics, would exceed 247 million, placing it above Mexico, Brazil and the United States as the largest Christian congregation in the world, he predicted.

"Mao thought he could eliminate religion. He thought he had accomplished this," Prof Yang said. "It's ironic – they didn't. They actually failed completely."
Like many Chinese churches, the church in the town of Liushi, 200 miles south of Shanghai in Zhejiang province, has had a turbulent history.

It was founded in 1886 after William Edward Soothill, a Yorkshire-born missionary and future Oxford University professor, began evangelising local communities.

But by the late 1950s, as the region was engulfed by Mao's violent anti-Christian campaigns, it was forced to close.

Liushi remained shut throughout the decade of the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, as places of worship were destroyed across the country.
Since it reopened in 1978 its congregation has gone from strength to strength as part of China's officially sanctioned Christian church – along with thousands of others that have accepted Communist Party oversight in return for being allowed to worship.

Today it has 2,600 regular churchgoers and holds up to 70 baptisms each year, according to Shi Xiaoli, its 27-year-old preacher. The parish's revival reached a crescendo last year with the opening of its new 1,500ft mega-church, reputedly the biggest in mainland China.

"Our old church was small and hard to find," said Ms Shi. "There wasn't room in the old building for all the followers, especially at Christmas and at Easter. The new one is big and eye-catching."

The Liushi church is not alone. From Yunnan province in China's balmy southwest to Liaoning in its industrial northeast, congregations are booming and more Chinese are thought to attend Sunday services each week than do Christians across the whole of Europe.

A recent study found that online searches for the words "Christian Congregation" and "Jesus" far outnumbered those for "The Communist Party" and "Xi Jinping", China's president.

Here are some thoughts I read on this topic today.

Spiritual Destruction or Awakening - The Choice is Ours.
http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/spiritual-destruction-or-awakening.html

Atheism is depressing only because you'd believe that you're practically on your own in this world. Whether that would be actually depressing would depend on the persons temperament though. Some might sulk while some might see it as a challenge to take full control and responsibility for their lives.


Much of this was after they let in all those "immigrants". Their problem was that living in peace and happiness for a long time has somehow made them a bit more trusting. Rather mean comparison but it's like the dodos. They never had any predators so when humans came in, they'd even just walk towards people expecting no harm.

As for the suicide rates, imagine going to an amusement park, on your own, after a really bad break up. All the happiness around you just amplify the sadness inside. If everyone's happy but you are not, you start to think that the problem is you.

The literal insanity of mainstream public discourse, and the lack of insight of this fact, suggests that Man without religion is non-viable.

To put matters another way - religion is the most important thing in the human world.  

Of course, a few individuals, in the short term, can survive atheism mentally intact; but there is no evidence at all that this is a possibility for human societies over more than a few decades - then the signs of insanity (incoherence, exitinction) become more-and-more obvious... or they would do so if loss of insight was not itself a prime sign of insanity.

So insanity shields us from knowledge of our own insanity, because insanity destroys insight as much as it destroys judgement - it affects the whole mode of thinking.

How, then, do we know we, as a society, are insane?

1. By applying older judgements, from the time before Men became insane - reading old books, talking to non-modern people...

2. By looking at the basic biological viability of atheist societies in terms of reproduction, demographics, response to direct and immediate threats, scale of priorities ... Compare societies and groups that are biologically viable, with the modern atheist societies that are not...

3. By reflecting on how we feel about Life. Insane people are almost always miserable - dysphoric, despairing, desperate... almost all of the time. Even the euphoric frenzy of mania is brittle, and crashes into suicidal self-destruction with a high frequency. Is there hope?

In conclusion - religion is the most important thing.

Religion is necessary for long term motivation, for social coherence, for purpose, and to enable the individual to be a part of the whole.

Since religion is necessary, if or when humans either dispense with religion or else place it anything lower than first in priority; then they as individuals and their societies will begin to fall apart and spiral towards alienation, purposelessness, inability to perceive or reason what is important, cowardice (i.e. short-term selfishness), desperation and all the rest of it.

Modernity is the experiment of Man living without Religion. The experiment has been running for several generations.

But the experiment of modernity has deprived modern people of the motivation, honesty and ability to evaluate the results of the experiment - by the always changing criteria of modernity, modernity sees no alternative to itself...

Conclusion: Religion is objectively necessary; and, by one kind of reasoning, therefore true. If you are not religious you are living in error. If you are not religious then you need to become religious. The question you must settle is not whether you should be religious, but which religion you will adopt.

Your data is pretty interesting but I don't i think it is very true. I did an Internet search on some of the successful countries on your list, most still identifies as Christians...
The claim that developed Western countries are full of atheists is myth.


Blame Bigotry for bad behaviors not Religion.