Irreligion - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Remember the new covenant in Jesus' blood:

Hebrews 8:12 For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.

If your sins are forgiven and forgotten as far as the Lord is concerned, then who do you think might be condemning you now? Why do you feel condemned all the time? What flawed interior judge constricts you and convicts you and contradicts God’s mercy to you in Jesus? It’s your conscience. 

Religion relies on your conscience. There is no religion without it. Religion counts on the undeniable fact that your conscience is both a spiritual hypochondriac and a hanging judge. Your constant internal self-uncertainty and self-condemnation have made you an easy mark for religious programming, even doomsday cults. Religion banks on your conscience forever preaching to you what is right and wrong, while forever condemning you for failing to do good and avoid evil.

The Un-Religion

True Christianity is the un-religion. It’s a non-religion. Moreover, real Christianity is the end of all religion. Religious people are dancing with a corpse and don’t know it. Here’s why.

Is it our desire to reach a distant God? In Jesus, God reached us. Is it our desire to make things right between us and God? In Jesus, we are reconciled to God making everything right. Is it our desire to escape the prison of sin and death? In Jesus, sin and death are defeated. This is the message of the Bible. No religious fervor necessary on our part. Jesus did it all.

The good news of The Un-religion is that you don't have to work your way to God the Father to get forgiven. He came to you with unconditional forgiveness in God the Son. So why not just say "thanks," and then ask him to help you make your condemning conscience shut up!

INFINITY NOW: ETERNITY IN THE PRESENT

CARE AND COUNSELING CENTER OF GEORGIA

***

Gallup Religiosity Index 2009 

(light color indicates religious, dark nonreligious)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion#:  Irreligion (adjective form: non-religious or irreligious) is the absence of religion, an indifference towards religion, a rejection of religion, or hostility towards religion. When characterized as the rejection of religious belief, it includes explicit atheism, religious dissidence, and secular humanism. When characterized as hostility towards religion, it includes anticlericalism, antireligion, and antitheism.

When characterized as indifference to religion, it includes apatheism. When characterized as the absence of religious belief, it may also include deism, implicit atheism, spiritual but not religious, agnosticism, pandeism, ignosticism, nontheism, pantheism, panentheism, religious skepticism, and freethought. Irreligion may include forms of theism, depending on the religious context it is defined against. In 18th-century Europe, the epitome of irreligion was deism.

A 2012 survey found that 36% of the world population is not religious and that between 2005 and 2012 world religiosity decreased by 9 percentage points. Being nonreligious is not necessarily equivalent to being an atheist or agnostic. A Pew Research Center global report in 2012 noted that many of the nonreligious actually have some religious beliefs. According to the study, "belief in God or a higher power is shared by 7% of Chinese unaffiliated adults, 30% of French unaffiliated adults and 68% of unaffiliated U.S. adults." The majority of the nonreligious (76%) are concentrated in Asia and the Pacific, while only a small portion comes from Europe (12%) or North America (5%).

Most Western democracies protect the freedom of religion, and it is largely implied in respective legal systems that those who do not believe or observe any religion are allowed freedom of thought.

A Pew 2015 global projection study for religion and nonreligion, projects that between 2010 and 2050, there will some initial increases of the unaffiliated followed by a decline by 2050 due to lower global fertility rates among this demographic.  Sociologist Phil Zuckerman's global studies on atheism have indicated that global atheism may be in decline due to irreligious countries having the lowest birth rates in the world and religious countries having higher birth rates in general.

Some varieties of atheism

      on right

Explicit "positive" / "strong" / "hard"

atheists assert that "At least one deity exists" is false.

      on right

Explicit "negative" / "weak" / "soft"

atheists do not assert the above but reject or eschew a belief that any deities exist.

      on left

Implicit "negative" / "weak" / "soft"

atheists include agnostics (and infants or babies) who do not believe that a deity or deities exist and who have not explicitly rejected or eschewed such a belief.

Note: Areas in the diagram are not meant to indicate relative numbers of people.

So, in philosophy (Flew and Martin notwithstanding), atheism is commonly defined along the lines of "rejection of theistic belief". This is often misunderstood to mean only the view that there is no God, but it is conventional to distinguish between two or three main sub-types of atheism in this sense. However, writers differ in their characterization of this distinction, and in the labels they use for these positions.



The terms "weak atheism" and "strong atheism", also known as "negative atheism" and "positive atheism", are often used as synonyms of Smith's less well-known "implicit" and "explicit" categories. Their original, technical meanings, however, are different and distinct from weak and strong atheism. "Strong explicit" atheists assert that it is false that any deities exist. "Weak explicit" atheists assert they do not believe in deities, but do not assert it is true that deities do not exist. Those who do not believe any deities exist, but do not assert their non-belief are included among implicit atheists. Among weak implicit atheists are thus sometimes included the following: children and adults who have never heard of deities; people who have heard of deities but have never given the idea any considerable thought; and those agnostics who suspend belief about deities, but do not reject such belief.

Smith observes that some motivations for explicit atheism are rational and some not. Of the rational motivations, he says:

The most significant variety of atheism is explicit atheism of a philosophical nature. This atheism contends that the belief in god is irrational and should therefore be rejected. Since this version of explicit atheism rests on a criticism of theistic beliefs, it is best described as critical atheism.

For Smith, explicit atheism is subdivided further into three groups:

1. the view usually expressed by the statement "I do not believe in the existence of a god or supernatural being";
2. the view usually expressed by the statement "God does not exist" or "the existence of God is impossible";
3. the view which "refuses to discuss the existence of a god" because "the concept of a god is unintelligible".

Although, as mentioned above, Nagel opposes identifying what Smith calls "implicit atheism" as atheism, the two authors do very much agree on the three-part subdivision of "explicit atheism" above, though Nagel does not use the term "explicit".