La creencia de más rápido crecimiento en el mundo
es la de los no creyentes
Ninguna religión creció tan rápido durante el siglo XX
como los no creyentes
Mientras que casi nadie se identificaba como no creyente en 1900,
en la actualidad lo hace un 15%
en la actualidad lo hace un 15%
La tasa de natalidad en los países musulmanes está cayendo en picado
a una velocidad sin precedentes
a una velocidad sin precedentes
En Irán, Omán, EAU, Argelia, Bangladesh, Túnez, Libia, Albania, Qatar y Kuwait
la natalidad ha caído un 60% en 30 años
la natalidad ha caído un 60% en 30 años
El secularismo está en aumento en los países de mayoría musulmana
El 5% de los saudíes se dicen ateos y el 19% no creyentes,
más que en Italia
[Matt Ridley]
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.
Leer el artículo íntegro de Matt Ridley, aquí
