– People are categorised based on their religious leaning into theists, atheists or agnostics
– Nigeria is a multi-religious country but the two most popular religions are Christianity and Isam
– There certain new religions which are dominating some regions of the world other than the two major religions in Nigeria
The number of people who are free thinkers n the word is growing everyday. Likewise, atheists and agnostics are increasing. This new development is a huge challenge on the Christianity and Islam.
The effects of people, who are changing from Christianity and Islam to other new religions, are much enormous. It was learnt sometime in March this year that the United Kingdom Mennonites, which are well-renowned churches, held their last church service, as members refused to come for church programmes, as well as death of parishioners.
It was also never predicted that Anabaptists, a group of plain cloth church goers, will become less fashionable despite the advent of smart phones. The Anabaptists followed the Amish ways of life in the way they worship. In addition, the response in most part of the world is much lack of interest in church activities
Currently in North America and most parts of European countries, atheists are growing in leaps and bounds. In the United States, at least, a quarter of the population do not believe in the existence of God. The US has witnessed a situation whereby non- Christians have overtaken the Catholics and the protestants in number, as well other non-Christians.
It was found out that the absence of religion or no religion affected how people trained their children, cast their votes during election periods, and do other things of life and their responsibilities to the society.
– Nigeria is a multi-religious country but the two most popular religions are Christianity and Isam
– There certain new religions which are dominating some regions of the world other than the two major religions in Nigeria
The number of people who are free thinkers n the word is growing everyday. Likewise, atheists and agnostics are increasing. This new development is a huge challenge on the Christianity and Islam.
The effects of people, who are changing from Christianity and Islam to other new religions, are much enormous. It was learnt sometime in March this year that the United Kingdom Mennonites, which are well-renowned churches, held their last church service, as members refused to come for church programmes, as well as death of parishioners.
It was also never predicted that Anabaptists, a group of plain cloth church goers, will become less fashionable despite the advent of smart phones. The Anabaptists followed the Amish ways of life in the way they worship. In addition, the response in most part of the world is much lack of interest in church activities
Currently in North America and most parts of European countries, atheists are growing in leaps and bounds. In the United States, at least, a quarter of the population do not believe in the existence of God. The US has witnessed a situation whereby non- Christians have overtaken the Catholics and the protestants in number, as well other non-Christians.
It was found out that the absence of religion or no religion affected how people trained their children, cast their votes during election periods, and do other things of life and their responsibilities to the society.
The World's Newest Major Religion: No Religion:
As secularism grows, atheists and agnostics are trying to expand and diversify their ranks.
More people than ever before are identifying as atheist, agnostic, or otherwise nonreligious, with potentially world-changing effects.
You don’t usually think of churches as going out of business, but it happens. In March, driven by parishioner deaths and lack of interest, the U.K. Mennonites held their last collective service.
It might seem easy to predict that plain-dressing Anabaptists—who follow a faith related to the Amish—would become irrelevant in the age of smartphones, but this is part of a larger trend. Around the world, when asked about their feelings on religion, more and more people are responding with a meh.
The religiously unaffiliated, called "nones," are growing significantly. They’re the second largest religious group in North America and most of Europe. In the United States, nones make up almost a quarter of the population. In the past decade, U.S. nones have overtaken Catholics, mainline protestants, and all followers of non-Christian faiths.
A lack of religious affiliation has profound effects on how people think about death, how they teach their kids, and even how they vote. (Watch The Story of God With Morgan Freeman for more about how different religions understand God and creation.)
There have long been predictions that religion would fade from relevancy as the world modernizes, but all the recent surveys are finding that it’s happening startlingly fast. France will have a majority secular population soon. So will the Netherlands and New Zealand. The United Kingdom and Australia will soon lose Christian majorities. Religion is rapidly becoming less important than it’s ever been, even to people who live in countries where faith has affected everything from rulers to borders to architecture.
But nones aren’t inheriting the Earth just yet. In many parts of the world—sub-Saharan Africa in particular—religion is growing so fast that nones’ share of the global population will actually shrink in 25 years as the world turns into what one researcher has described as “the secularizing West and the rapidly growing rest.” (The other highly secular part of the world is China, where the Cultural Revolution tamped down religion for decades, while in some former Communist countries, religion is on the increase.)
Europe
inset
SOUTH
AMERICA
AFRICA
NORTH
AMERICA
ASIA
Change in percent of Christians and Muslims within population, 2005-2015
AUSTRAL.
Gain (Christianity)
Gain (Islam)
more than 5
more than 5
2-5
2-5
Loss (Christianity)
No country lost more than 2% of its Islamic population
2-5
more than 5
ANDREW UMENTUM, NG STAFF
SOURCE: WORLD RELIGION DATABASE
And even in the secularizing West, the rash of “religious freedom bills”—which essentially decriminalize discrimination—are the latest front in a faith-tinged culture war in the United States that shows no signs of abetting anytime soon.
Within the ranks of the unaffiliated, divisions run deep. Some are avowed atheists. Others are agnostic. And many more simply don’t care to state a preference. Organized around skepticism toward organizations and united by a common belief that they do not believe, nones as a group are just as internally complex as many religions. And as with religions, these internal contradictions could keep new followers away.
Millennials to God: No Thanks
If the world is at a religious precipice, then we’ve been moving slowly toward it for decades. Fifty years ago, Time asked in a famous headline, “Is God Dead?” The magazine wondered whether religion was relevant to modern life in the post-atomic age when communism was spreading and science was explaining more about our natural world than ever before.
We’re still asking the same question. But the response isn’t limited to yes or no. A chunk of the population born after the article was printed may respond to the provocative question with, “God who?” In Europe and North America, the unaffiliated tend to be several years younger than the population average. And 11 percent of Americans born after 1970 were raised in secular homes.
Scientific advancement isn’t just making people question God, it’s also connecting those who question. It’s easy to find atheist and agnostic discussion groups online, even if you come from a religious family or community. And anyone who wants the companionship that might otherwise come from church can attend a secular Sunday Assembly or one of a plethora of Meetups for humanists, atheists, agnostics, or skeptics.
The groups behind the web forums and meetings do more than give skeptics witty rejoinders for religious relatives who pressure them to go to church—they let budding agnostics know they aren’t alone.
But it’s not easy to unite people around not believing in something. “Organizing atheists is like herding cats,” says Stephanie Guttormson, the operations director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, which is merging with the Center for Inquiry. “But lots of cats have found their way into the 'meowry.'”
Guttormson says the goal of her group is to organize itself out of existence. They want to normalize atheism to a point where it’s so common that atheists no longer need a group to tell them it’s okay not to believe, or to defend their morals in the face of religious lawmakers.
But it’s not there yet.
Atheism’s Diversity Problem
The Center for Inquiry in Washington, D.C., hosts a regular happy hour called Drinking Skeptically. On a Wednesday in late March, about a dozen people showed up to faithlessly imbibe, and all but one were white.
“Most of the groups I’ve seen have been predominantly white, but I’m not sure what to attribute that to,” says Kevin Douglas, the lone African-American drinker, shrugging at the demographics. He came from a religious family in New York and struggled internally with his skepticism until shortly after college. The only time he mentions having difficulty with others accepting his atheism was when he worked in Dallas, Texas, and race, he says, had little to do with it.
But more typically, “there is pressure from our [African-American] community,” says Mandisa Thomas, the founder and president of the Atlanta-based Black Nonbelievers, Inc. This pressure stems from the place religion—Christianity in particular—holds in African-American history.
In the abolition movement churches “became a support system for blacks. It became almost the end-all be-all for the black community for a number of years,” Thomas says, adding that the Civil Rights movement was dominated—she says “hijacked”—by religious leaders.
“If you either reject or identify as a nonbeliever, you’re seen as betraying your race,” she says.
Thomas is an outlier among nonbelievers for another reason. She’s a woman.
The secularizing West is full of white men. The general U.S. population is 46 percent male and 66 percent white, but about 68 percent of atheists are men, and 78 percent are white. Atheist Alliance International has called the gender imbalance in its ranks “a significant and urgent issue.”
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