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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Not to imply that population isn't going to be an issue (especially since we're likely going to flood a bunch of arable land in the next few decades) but if the graph "Yearly Population Growth Rate (%)" here (http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/) is to be believed, there's been a pretty significant drop-off in world population growth in the last ~50 years and we're certainly nowhere near the exponentially exploding population crisis that people were fearing in the mid 20th century.

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The good news is that we'll probably top out around 10-11 billion people. The bad news is that we don't manage to live sustainably even with 7.5, half of which live in utter poverty.

I learnt from that that there are more non-religious people than there are catholics! I had no idea. (Most of my friends are catholics, I'm atheist)

Not non-religious, but other religions - the fact that only -+28% are christians might give some humbleness to those feeling righteous and above all in religious aspects (ie us vs those poor lost pagans mindset).

Since muslims believe in basically the same god it gives you 54% (jews are rather insignificant portion of population). It still means 3.5 billions currently (and historically over 100 billion) are breaking 10 core amendments and should burn in hell eternally (grossly oversimplified obviously).

You can't just bring rationality, common sense or critical thinking into most current religions, they fall apart like house of cards.

I wish there would be some new major religion that would only preach a single thing - be a nice, good person to yourself and every sentient living creature out there. Nothing more required.

>Not non-religious, but other religions

Not sure what you mean by that - you seem to be not very politely saying I got the stat wrong? I was referring to the line:

"No Religion affiliation (16%): atheists, agnostics and people who do not identify with any particular religion."

- which I think it's fair to summarize as "non-religious". (And 15.5% are catholic apparently)

edit: ..Although when I was at my most religious, 25 years ago, I didn't 'identify with any particular religion' but felt very close to a number of different ones - Hindu gurus, christian mystics, buddhism of various types, sufis etc.

Second derivatives will not save us this time.

There's a good animated video that explains this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348

> Not to imply that population isn't going to be an issue

Population is already an issue, this isn't some future problem.

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