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Comment by aurizon | Hacker News Reader

Strange? I wonder if this is an imitative of classic religions (which are fading everywhere) to create a support base for mysticism in general - what next? Astrology?

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> While religiously unaffiliated people currently make up 16% of the global population, only an estimated 10% of the world’s newborns between 2010 and 2015 were born to religiously unaffiliated mothers. This dearth of newborns among the unaffiliated helps explain why religious “nones” (including people who identity as atheist or agnostic, as well as those who have no particular religion) are projected to decline as a share of the world’s population in the coming decades.

https://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-reli...

As more women are freed from their own fecundity, the average age rises, fewer children with better lives and education, and less religiosity endures.

Sorry, but I don't think this rebuffs Pew.

Eight ball says, "future murky".

What do you mean by "classic religions"? If you mean faiths like Christianity and Islam, then they're not fading everywhere. Globally, they're growing. Only in the West do we see a decline in Christianity and the rise of various New Age-y mythologies and superstitions.

There exists a strange statistical effect - if you ask people a large number say they are religious, but if you put a meter on the pews, attendance is in free fall in most of Canada. Quebec, hitherto a staunchly Catholic province, now has one of the lowest rates in Canada. Ontario is similar. There was a huge abuse scandal all across Canada where priests and ministers had selectively chosen to work at schools where they and their female counterparts physically and sexually abused young boys and girls - in many cases to murder and death by suicide. This led to thousands of prosecutions and huge fines and many jail sentences both for the crime and abetting these crimes. Hundreds of them were awarded compensation and a huge number of church properties had to be sold, and the recruitment of new ministers and priests became impossible in Canada(there were a few areas that were spared by the presence of strong people who rid their parishes of bad people). To this day there is a near total absence of newly trained Canadian priests, nuns and ministers. Immigrants help, but tend to stay within their countrymen in the cities - leaving the country full of vacant parishes. The general populace cares little, most have moved on to a fully secular life and have not looked back. Recent immigrants are fading as they see nothing happens, the old time highly supervisory religious structure is gone. Muslims try the hardest to maintain the full supervisory panoply, but few workplaces have enough adherents to self-supervise, and if they are alone, they often meet and marry outside the faith and carry on in a near secular manner. These are observations. In areas of high numbers of faithful a social structure often keeps a faith going, whatever kind it is.

Growing only by virtue of sheer population growth (religiosity is well correlated with poverty[1] and thus a higher fertility rate).

Proportionally it is fading.

[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/142727/religiosity-highest-worl...

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