Pessimistic me: human life is eradicated.
Religion will likely always exist in at least some segment of the population. Even if it’s based on actual science; perhaps on mathematical law… There’s still going to be religion.
When do private rituals and family customs become “religion”? Would lighting a candle in remembrance of the past year, and ascribing some private symbolism to that count? Would regular trips in search of solitude? What if I burn a fire in a similar ritual during that trip?
What about family getting together? And always doing those annoying things like “say what you’re grateful for”?
Cult mechanicus
Proof of aliens, maybe. If we find out there’s an entirely different version of life somewhere else, it would disprove pretty much every religion in existence.
Dunno dude, I’d say it’s more likely for nutcase religious countries, for example Iran, Afghanistan and (depending on the president) the USA, to start some kind of holy war against the aliens to proselytize the heathens or some shit like that.
Well you’ll probably have that or some sort of adoption of aliens into faith. The holy war (aliens are evil) or they’re messengers of god (are good.)
Quite possibly both.
They’d just start worshipping the aliens.
Well at least they’d be real. You could just ask them what they meant instead of arguing over it until a war starts.
The Hindus would probably just roll with it. Their religion is full of strange beings from another world occasionally visiting Earth.
Scientology?
Yeah but nobody really believes in that shit. It’s just a pyramid scheme.
Daddy, who is that person on the cross?
That Jenny is an important person. His name is this information under memetic quarantine by the United States Federal Bureau of Control per the Cognito Hazard act of 2072.
God comes down and takes all his stuff back.
In democratic or pretending to be democratic countries I believe we’d see a greater emphasis put on the reduction of Human suffering. In flagrantly undemocratic countries either the ruler adopting social policies for their people or a significant spike in militant unrest as the ruler is in opposition to living well in the one life we’ve got.
There’s still going to be shysters and there’s still going to be people who don’t know and/or don’t want to deal with statistics so there will still be various movements against the wellbeing of of people but I expect that they will be significantly diminished compared to now where they can appeal to the will of eldritch abominations to justify their malevolence.
I would expect racism to both get better and worse… better in that for the average person ethnicities that are commonly not whichever religion is dominant in your society there should be less nonsense to justify distrusting them and worse in that the shysters may lean in on racial hatred as their means of control.
I would hope that there’s less war as the justifications made to the populace of my homeland tends to occasionally be flavored with religious bigotry. However, I’m well aware that those justifications aren’t the main reasons for those wars, if anything they are worse. I suppose it’s a matter of if the lies used to sell war to the populace are as convincing without religion and simultaneously how acceptable people find the notion of going to war with the knowledge that they’re risking their only life.
I don’t think that all religions are likely to ever disappear short of all humans disappearing, but to have the vast majority people not religious, it would be a slow decline based on increasing access to information, birth control, and laws favouring non religious people.
Consumerism makes a decent dent in traditional religions, where ever it takes hold, doesn’t it ?
When the started opening shops on Sundays, Church attendance took a hit.
Even as an atheist, I can’t say that’s a good thing, buts it’s best idea I can offer . I don’t think it will ever happen. Telling stories remains a key characteristic of human development.
Telling stories can easily happen without religion though.
consumerism is it’s own new religion, also I’m not sure that the evidence available supports that it was Sunday shopping that caused a decline in church attendance compared to… just people not going to church. in certain places, it was churchgoers wanting to reform things because it “enforced idleness.” (Uhm, what did you think the sabbath was about?)
When the real angels show up again. Aka the UAPs and non human intelligence.
Just as long as it happens is all I care about. It’s a process, like anything else it just takes successive generations of breeding the ignorance out of our genes. I think there will always be some kind of religious insitutions around, people seem to need to believe in things that are fantastic and supernatural.
They couldn’t even escape the pull of it in “Dune,” there was plenty of religion even in a place where it seems to have no great purpose. People are just that way - they are willing to put their belief in crazy stuff.
