Failure of the new religious fevor

While the current issue of The Economists makes some good points about the rise of religion, I disagree with the forecasts. In this article they are forecasting that the role of religion will continue to increase. While this is somewhat true I think the authors have missed two important points: the increased diversity of religions, even within the larger ones and the patience for such solutions.

Firstly religions are mostly in a free market and so they are forced to compete with each other. this is not new but the amount of competition is clearly at an all time high since information has never flowed so easily. This means that while the percentage of people with some religion/spirituality will probably remain roughly constant or with a slow decline to to more information about alternatives to superstitious world views, but the overall infulence will decrease because we will no longer have a single voice for the large chunk of religious people. For instance in the US the religious voice of the protestants was largely the religious voice in the early 20th century. Now that group has been subdivided many times and continues to subdivide. Similarly if the number of Muslims increase this does not mean you simply have more people wanting sharia law or something since there are many competing forms of Islam including secular Islam. In this sense there is a big divide and conquer scheme amidst. Religions continue to compete for followers and change to attract the largest market share and so the religious voice becomes an incoherent chorus, losing its power.

The other thing to note is that people will abandon ways that do not work. While many places are trying to return to religion for various reasons in the end when they lack medical care and economic opportunities for their children due to spending much time on religion and not science I doubt many will continue with such a lost cause. Currently it may seem like a good idea to fight for your place in the world using religion instead of science, but business doesn't work so well with religion and so it will again fail (one need only look at most Muslim countries economies and compare them to secular Turkey or precivil war Lebanon). As science continues to move ahead and provide cures, preventive treatments and economic opportunity religious people will realize the only one's with opportunity are the one's preaching the religions and abandon it for a more private faith and secular public life. I don't give the current large religious uprising (meaning religion in government and public life) more than 20 years in North America, but the middle east I think it will continue to increase for about 50 years until the oil is scarce and water is more valuable and there troubles are truly huge and their religion and so utterly failed them. I think it will end like in Dune. The Muad'hib has died, we are just waiting for the Preacher's message to take solid root. But the largest religious deconversion I predict for South America as their economies continue to grow. We'll see!

But I'm not saying religion/spirituality will disappear (I'm not that much of an optimist), merely that it's relevance will go back to pre-1960's level in public life.