:sad_yes:, I totally agree with you…
I sometimes think that as long as people are away from GOD then Jesus second coming will be also far away in the future
…
Or, my friend, it might be the opposite: His coming might be sooner than we think.
To the OP,
The answer is yes, with the following caveat: Who is “we”? You are an pantheist. Other responders in this thread are atheist. Neither of these positions form any sort of united or cohesive whole inclusive of traditional religious people. To the extent that there are an increasing number of you, you have a point in so far as you take the increase of your community to be evidence of some kind of absolute or irreversible or inevitable tendency toward further increase. But I would be careful of that. Famous secularist and one-time bounty Salman Rushdie was asked by television host Bill Moyers some years ago as part of the latter’s “Faith and Reason” series on PBS about the evolution of religious belief in societies and in himself. Rushdie responded that he never feels the twinge of even nascent belief within himself because he comes from a generation of Indians that embraced the ethos of the secular, free-minded 1960s Western cultural mindset. Given that, he did not foresee the rise of fundamentalism (particularly Islamic, as that is his background, though he also mentions Hindu and Buddhist forms, if I remember correctly) beginning arguably in the 1970s (with the rise of the “Religious Right” as a political force in the USA, the establishment of an Islamic state in Iran, etc). It just didn’t seem likely from his viewpoint, because it
wasn’t likely from his viewpoint. And yet it happened because not everyone thinks like Salman Rushdie does.
I would say the same thing to you: You may be right (certain societies or segments of society are post-religious) without actually being right on a large enough scale to be able to say anything about “we”, if by “we” you mean more than you and people who already think like you. And of course, what seems like an inexorable march of progress can be reversed, take a sharp turn, or be otherwise destroyed without your (name removed by moderator)ut, no matter how obviously right you think your principles are. Just ask the Russians who lived through and deeply believed in communism (for a while, anyway). The practice of religion for them has not returned to pre-Communist levels, and it may never do so, but the reintroduction of religion on any scale in an official capacity shows that, even with massive demographic changes, there is still a place for religion in an otherwise largely atheistic worldview. In fact, in my own life I had two major teachers of Russian (language) who provided a good contrast that illustrates what I am talking about: One, who was in her teens and early 20s in the 1960s, insisted that not only that she was not religious, but that of her generation no one was religious, given the indoctrination they received from the Communist Youth League and others that religion is bad, outdated, holds back progress, etc. The other was probably the single most intelligent man I’ve ever met, also a young man in the 1960s, but a committed Orthodox Christian (he told me stories of attending baptisms in family rooms with blacked-out windows, hoping to evade the authorities that punished religious believers with “re-education” in state mental facilities). From his description of life in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s, my other teacher was wrong in saying that no one of that generation was religious, but only in terms of degree, rather than in terms of official (as in government-sponsored) ethos.
