[ExI] atheists/religion

[John Clark]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 11:46 PM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>> And yet Romans, just like the Greeks, did not go extinct.
>>
>
> > ### To the contrary, the specific Greeks and Romans who lost their
> faith and stopped procreating did actually go extinct.
>

Obviously. But most Greeks and Romans did NOT stop procreating, and
although they may have switched their religious franchise from one to
another unfortunately very very few lost their faith.

> *Just to be clear - I am a good atheist, won't pull a John C. Wright and
> convert but neither do I deny that devout followers of some religions are
> better at procreation than atheists. It's a simple statistical fact.*
>

I don't know what statistics you're talking about but I do know that in
general very few people lose their faith, at most they just move from one
form of utter nonsense to a slightly different form of utter nonsense,
that's it. And most don't even do that. The statistics that affect the
birth rate of a country are it's GDP, the emancipation of women, and the
availability of birth control; the higher they are the lower the birth
rate. The simple statistic that you're looking for is that free rich women
with birth control just don't have lots of babies.

And it makes little difference what any religious franchise says about the
matter, just look at Ireland and how ineffectual the Catholic church's
orders to have as many children as is biologically possible have been. In
1965 Irish women had slightly over 4 births during their lifetime, but by
2017 that number had dropped to 1.8 although the church's orders never
changed. But what had changed are the economic conditions, as late as 1990
the GDP of Ireland was less than 50 billion but by 2017 it was 382 billion
and for its size Ireland is now one of the richest countries in the world.
And it's a fact, countries full of rich people just don't have many
children.

John K Clark
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