In the summer 2002 issue of Free Inquiry magazine, Gregory S. Paul in his article, "The Secular Revolution of the West," documents from social science data that developed countries other than the U.S. have experienced dramatic declines in religious belief during the last few decades. People with a basically Secular Humanist outlook form pluralities in most European countries, Japan & Australia. This seems to have happened spontaneously, without any organized effort to suppress religion, unlike the case in former Communist countries. (Unfortunately this article isn't available on the Web, so you might have to look up a copy in a library.)
Other sources reveal that these same countries also score high in rankings of overall quality of life, measured in terms of longevity, good health, high levels of education and low levels of violence. Several of them score better in these regards than the religious, violent and semi-literate U.S., which is those respects is more like a Third World crap heap than a developed country.
Now, according to christian propaganda in the U.S. about the evils of unbelief & Secular Humanism, a country with at least 20% of its population professing atheism or agnosticism should in practice be a nihilistic hell. But the empirical reality seems to belie that stereotype. After all, about a quarter of the Australians lack belief in god, but many American christians would readily travel to Australia for a vacation.
Given that Secular Humanism outside of the U.S. seems perfectly compatible with the good life in several functional countries, and may even facilitate it by removing superstitious barriers, isn't it time that American Humanists call the religionists' bluff by confronting them with the facts?
After all, I doubt that god's comfort level was ever the real issue in the debate between religion and Humanism. Apart from a few aberrations, people in general wouldn't really care what the self-professed spokesmen for some absent & apparently powerless god said it wanted, if they thought a worldly alternative could deliver the goods. The radical Enlightenment's view of a decent life after the jettison of revealed religion doesn't seem so utopian now.
Immortalists will also find Paul's article worth reading because he's written a book about future technologies which indicates that he's One Of Us. In the article he also acknowledges that our current vulnerability to mortality remains a key weakness in "the good life" offered by Secular Humanism. But he ends with:
As cyber-technology continues to advance at an exponential rate, it is possible that highly intelligent, conscious machines will be devised in this century. If so, their power should quickly far exceed human levels. Human minds may directly interact with, and even be dowloaded into, these powerful new machines. If increasing numbers of minds, human and artificial, achieve godlike powers -- perhaps even effective immortality -- via practical technological rather than improbable supernatural means, then the classic religions may be destroyed. After all, Christianity has only existed for just 2 percent of human existence, and the mythology may experience the same fate as ancient Egyptian theology.
