Just had to share...

[Magón]

Okay, so every once in a while I like to go onto CNN and see what kinda loony things they've got to say, blah, blah, blah. (I find it's like where everyone from SF go to speak publicly when they don't want to be known as apart of SF.)

Anyway, I found their latest blog thing in their Belief part of the site. I love the page sometimes, it's good for some good laughs. Anyway, enjoy reading 11 Faith based predictions for 2011. (Or not, I don't really care if you read them, I just wanted to share. :p)

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/01/11-faith-based-predictions-for-2011/?hpt=C2

[Raúl Duke]

I liked # 2 and #4

I'm skeptical of #1; it's also somewhat based off faulty info it seems.

#3 is stupid, for one there's no such push in the US (where it would be more likely that such a term would be popularized) and I doubt that most countries in Europe care that there's an alleged (I doubt it) political trend towards secularization since there's already a societal/demographic trend towards secularization.

In fact, my prediction (call it the twelfth one) is that in developed countries the secularization trend will continue, including the US but perhaps there it would take a different form.

In the US, mainstream churches are becoming more "liberal," secular, whatever in the sense that they don't push political culture-conservatism issues much or may represent the "liberal"/progressive side of said issues. Perhaps it's because of (or a reaction to) the fact that most new non-religious or non-practicing/secular people come from these mainstream churches. Also, the fundamentalists and such also come from these churches as well. Christianity hasn't really "grown" (one could say its shrinking) yet fundamentalist or conservative churches are or were growing. I'm basing this off of an article I read from EDGE called "why the gods aren't winning" plus some surveys in the past years that showed an increase in non-religious people in America and from another book.

This is why I'm skeptical (but not against per se, just don't see as joining in that "crusade" to be a good way to spend my time) of the "New Atheism's" push to confront the religious and use all these propaganda tactics to, ahem, "spread" atheism or whatever. More non-religious people will come despite them, the only good thing that the whole "New Atheism" thing did was make it more public and allow people to feel ok to be an atheist/etc. Yet they could have done that without being too confrontational with theists. While their beliefs are stupid, there's no reason to mock them constantly/etc. If anything, they should only get confrontational when religious people move into political issues (i.e. gay rights, etc) and education (evolution) but outside of that I don't care if they chose to believe whatever.