5. While the world religions are likely to persist and evolve for the foreseeable future, we might for the rest of this century see an efflorescence of relatively small religions jostling to break out among these groups. The religiously unaffiliated will see a 3% increase. Hinduism has four main groups: Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism and Smartism. Tomorrow’s Gods: What is the future of religion? ), A flame burns in a Zoroastrian Fire Temple, possibly for more than a millennium (Credit: Getty Images). And there is some evidence for that – although when it comes to religion, there are always exceptions to any rule. Then there’s the political impact. A Little History of Religion by Richard Holloway, Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by Karen Armstrong, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens, Available for everyone, funded by readers. What remains debatable, however, is whether they can afford to be irreligious because they have strong secular institutions – or whether being secular has helped them achieve social stability. One recurring theme is social cohesion: religion brings together a community, who might then form a hunting party, raise a temple or support a political party. In 2015, 1.2 billion people in the world, or 16%, said they have no religious affiliation at all. In a landmark study, people directly affected by the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand became significantly more religious than other New Zealanders, who became marginally less religious. And even though Christians will also outgrow the general population over that period, with an increase of 34% forecast mainly thanks to population growth in sub-Saharan Africa, Christianity is likely to lose its top spot in the world religion league table to Islam by the middle of this century. In 1968, the eminent sociologist Peter Berger told the New York Times that by “the 21st Century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture”. Muslim women have an average of 2.9 children, significantly above the average of all non-Muslims at 2.2. All rights reserved. In Scotland, another country steeped in religious tradition, a majority of people, 59%, now identify as non-religious – with significantly more women (66%) than men (55%) turning away from organised faith. Despite this, religion is not disappearing on a global scale – at least in terms of numbers. Their grandchildren, however, are growing up in a world of geopolitical stresses and socioeconomic angst; they are more likely to hark back to supposedly simpler times. And arguments over ways to evade the Basilisk’s gaze are every bit as convoluted as the medieval Scholastics’ attempts to square human freedom with divine oversight. What does it mean for the future? But the leader of the new state was the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who implemented a political system based on Islamic beliefs and appointed the heads of the judiciary, military and media. (If this is the first you’ve heard of it: sorry! China has seen a huge religious revival in recent years and some predict it will have the world’s largest Christian population by 2030. Transhumanism, Jediism, the Witnesses of Climatology and the myriad of other new religious movements may never amount to much. In 2016, the Temple of the Jedi Order, members of which follow the tenets of the faith central to the Star Wars films, failed in its effort to be recognised as a religious organisation under UK charity law. According to 2015 figures, Christians form the biggest religious group by some margin, with 2.3 billion adherents or 31.2% of the total world population of 7.3 billion. In Russia, by contrast, the nationalistic overtones of both Rodnovery and the Orthodox church wins them tacit political backing. At the other end of the spectrum, the teeming societies of the West are at least nominally faithful to religions in which a single watchful, all-powerful god lays down, and sometimes enforces, moral instructions: Yahweh, Christ and Allah. However the government is secular. When you’ve lost a loved one, religion provides a therapeutic framework of … One of the biggest upheavals on the religious landscape in the next few years is likely to be the death (or, possibly, retirement) of Pope Francis, who is 81 and has a number of health issues. “I’d be careful about calling capitalism a religion, but a lot of its institutions have religious elements, as in all spheres of human institutional life,” says Wood. Such esoteric beliefs have arisen throughout history, but the ease with which we can now build a community around them is new. Asia-Pacific is the most populous region in the world, and also the most religious. And, finally, there are those who believe in something, but don’t belong to any group. There are reckoned to be another 10-12 million Catholics. #MeToo started out as a hashtag expressing anger and solidarity but now stands for real changes to long-standing social norms. What do these self-directed religions look like? Given this, we might expect the form that religion takes to follow the function it plays in a particular society – or as Voltaire might have put it, that different societies will invent the particular gods they need. In fact, religions, even the defunct ones, can provide uncannily appropriate metaphors for many of the more intractable features of modern life. The Understanding Unbelief project at the University of Kent in the UK is conducting a three-year, six-nation survey of attitudes among those who say they don’t believe God exists (“atheists”) and those who don’t think it’s possible to know if God exists (“agnostics”). “But they’re always looking at something that’s not measurable or you can’t really see or control. One notorious answer comes from Voltaire, the 18th Century French polymath, who wrote: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”Because Voltaire was a trenchant critic of organised religion, this quip is often quoted cynically. Communist states like Soviet Russia and China adopted atheism as state policy and frowned on even private religious expression. Official status is irrelevant if you can win thousands or even millions of followers to your cause. More prejudice and persecution. That’s a potent combination for believers and an unsettling one for secularists: can anything bridge the gap between them? But as missionary religions know, what begins as a mere flirtation or idle curiosity – perhaps piqued by a resonant statement or appealing ceremony – can end in a sincere search for truth. New religious movements often seek to preserve the central tenets of an older religion while stripping it of trappings that may have become stifling or old-fashioned. A Russian church in Antarctica, where climate change is playing out (Credit: Getty Images), Consider the “Witnesses of Climatology”, a fledgling “religion” invented to foster greater commitment to action on climate change. Muslims might be Sunni (the majority), Shia, Ibadi, Ahmadiyya or Sufi. The congregation numbers a few hundred, but Irzak, as a good engineer, is committed to testing out ways to grow that number.

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