Reddit reviews Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century

You should read the book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century Kindle Edition
by Eric Kaufmann (Author)

>Dawkins and Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward. But most people don't read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often innoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists. And what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population: in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have. The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries, and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularisation process in the West. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families.


>Within Judaism, the Ultra-Orthodox may achieve majority status over their liberal counterparts by mid-century. Islamist Muslims have won the culture war in much of the Muslim world, and their success provides a glimpse of what awaits the Christian West and Israel. Based on a wealth of demographic research, considering questions of multiculturalism and terrorism, Kaufmann examines the implications of the decline in liberal secularism as religious conservatism rises - and what this means for the future of western modernity.

>I do not deny that I hate the conservatives that wish gay people ill

You define "wishing gay people ill" to be disagreeing that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality. So I guess you are telling me that you hate me. Even though you hate me I don't hate you, I think that you're severely mistaken- but I can differentiate the error that you have fallen into from your dignity as a human person.

> Demographics is destiny.

Which is one of the reasons I am optimistic.

>but salivating at the empty thought that you might someday be able to forcibly annul my marriage to my husband

Under my view your marriage was never valid to begin with because both of your are incapable of consummating the marriage through the conjugal act.

>Third time I have asked this: Do other Christians interpret the Bible differently from you? Are they "obviously" incorrect? What if they told me you were "obviously" incorrect?

Ignoring the point that I am making, which is that there obviously are correct and incorrect interpretations of my and your words. If there were not then this conversation would never have been possible because we would be unintelligible to one another. It is possible for people to misinterpret scripture just like it is possible for them to misinterpret anything else. We can determine when a misinterpretation has occured by looking at the best evidence available for what the true meaning of the text is according to the context and what we know about the intent of the author- just like you have been doing this whole time with my words.

>The face of the cube is not the full cube, regardless of the perspective.

If we reduce a cube down to two dimensions it sure can be.

>For the analogy to hold, they would both have to be cubes

Or diagrams of two different faces of the same cube from different two dimensional perspectives.

>If god is "omnipotent", then there is no such thing as "not being able".

I disagree. Note that you haven't given me your source for this definition of omnipotent. The only people I have ever heard describe it thus are atheists trying to straw-man it thus. A better tactic would be to look at how Christians themselves define what God's omnipotence means.

>You believe first and foremost in a supernatural world, whereas I only accept reality.

I'm skeptical that you have any basis for saying that there is no possibility of something beyond the natural world.