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any idea how secularism started at all? by your logic, it should have been snuffed out before we even knew about it.

Largely by a mixture of hypocrisy and commercialism. Catholicism has struggled mightily with this issue throughout its history, and is a big part of the reason that Protestantism even exists today. Get it, "Protest"ant? When people claim to hold values, and then act in apparent contradiction of those same values, it doesn't exactly inspire one to themselves adopt those values.

And that's been a major player, especially in the West, for the past ~70 years where you have politicians wearing religion on the coat of their sleeve, and then going and killing hundreds of thousands of people over what is overtly about oil, economics, and geopolitics - lofty moralistic rhetoric notwithstanding. Then you have things like the pedophilia scandals high within the Catholic hierarchy, made even worse by coverups.

This is probably why religions like fundamental Islam, Haredi Judaism, and so on are even more heritable. Those who follow such religions tend to very much live their proclaimed values. For instance I really don't agree with people like Khabib Nurmagomedov on many of his values, yet he lives those values, even when they hurt him in the short-run, and I find it very inspirational. I can only imagine how young (or older for that matter) Muslims see him. Integrity in life is just so important.

is secularism a result of hypocrisy in the flock in this scenario?

Definitely, our children do not learn so much from our words as much as from our behaviors and actions. Religious individuals like to claim that the decline in religiosity drove a decline of morality in society. I think it's rather the opposite - that a decline of morality in society drove a decline in religiosity.

It's like a parent trying to teach their child about healthy eating while they down cokes, chips, and sweets every day. That kid is going to be much more likely to, himself, end up downing cokes, chips, and sweets than he is to eat healthy. And for his own kids, he may not even bother with the pretext of healthy eating.

I like how you try to link lack of religiosity and lack of morality. it shows you understand neither.

Morality is relative. But from my worldview the perpetuation of a culture, and a society, is the first and foremost requirement of any successful culture or society, and arguably the single most primal responsibility of the people within that culture and society. This overlaps well with religion, but not so much with what I assume you might consider moral or amoral given your comment.

yes, this is why the Catholic church protects abusers. propagation of the memeplex comes above the people it pretends to save.

Your response is incoherent to me, can you rephrase it?

> But from my worldview the perpetuation of a culture, and a society, is the first and foremost requirement [...]and arguably the single most primal responsibility of the people within that culture and society. This overlaps well with religion,

I was agreeing with you, if not prescriptively, at least descriptively.

On that I would disagree. Had the Catholic Church chosen to take severe actions against the pedophiles, defrocking and even excommunication in severe cases, I think they would be in a far greater position today. By protecting the pedophiles, they have greatly imperiled their own authority and ability to persist into the future.

This gets back to the original discussion we were having about hypocrisy. Far lesser ails led to the Protestant reformation. In this case, alongside the dysfunction in the College of Cardinals, there will be no reformation but simply a decline.

they didn't know it was going to backfire. they were trying to save it using the same approach that worked for >1500 years.

I wouldn't say this is entirely accurate. For instance there's some irony in that the reason Priests can't marry is, in part, because of draconian measures against priests abusing their power by essentially establishing fiefdoms composed of Church lands and property. Local priests would control such property and then pass it onto their heirs, appoint family members to important positions, and generally just treat it their own little demesnes.

The Church responding with 'you can no longer get married and shall have no heirs' was a very serious FAFO moment. Just think about how huge a deal that is, if you can even imagine it! The Church used to make much more effort to abide their values, very much in the way that e.g. Islam does today. The centralized nature of the Catholic Church means this (the pedo stuff) could easily be rectified by a single person, the Pope, but their failure to do so is also what I was alluding to with the dysfunction in the College of Cardinals (which is whom elects the Pope).

basically religion worked so well that it stopped working.

I think they got caught with their pants down due to progress in communications. there was a time they could suppress information and get away with it. they didn't realise soon enough that the world had changed. in fact secularism helped give a refuge to the victims - if the highest law of the land was the church, then the old ways would have worked just fine.

I don't see how you can reconcile this with their past actions, like the prohibition of marriage or even the appointment of heirs - all as a effort to clamp down on abuses. This is what I was getting at with their historical actions prohibiting marriage. Imagine you live in a time where marriage was completely legal for those within the Church and then, as a punishment, they completely forbade it as well as the designation of heirs. That degree of extremism, in pursuit of a moral goal, is completely unimaginable in modern times - in most of any context. It'd be like combating corruption by requiring politicians give away all belongings when entering office and prohibit them from monetizing their time in office after leaving. That's just inconvenient, so it'd never happen.

In any case I suppose now we're looping back around to the original point that we started bickering on. I think the problem is that society has become broadly more amoral, including religious leaders. If one cannot lead by example, then one cannot lead. I think this is the exact same reason that government systems are also failing. It'll be interesting to see where and what this culminates in, as I expect it will happen without our lifetimes.

As for the Church, it was (and remains) never too late to pull a Hollywood. Hollywood had been making not entirely subtle jokes about Ratner, Weinstein, and all of these other guys for decades. Everybody in Hollywood knew they were sex abusers, but it's only when it became clear that they were beyond the point of no return that Hollywood was like 'oh my gosh, that's just so unacceptable, I can't believe you'd do that, away with thee.' But of course doing that would be inconvenient, so again - it'd never happen, certainly not with the current leadership nor cardinals that elected them.

Effects have mechanisms. Not everything works by correlation. In fact nothing really works by correlation. Things work by causes. Indoctrination, that's pretty effective, but so are heresy and sedition, and revolutions in thought, and sea-changes. Pew probably isn't monitoring those.

People leaving some faith would obviously be the inverse of those who stay with it. So for Protestantism, it'd be 16%, or 11% for highly religious households. In deciding to look up the numbers for Islam, it's somewhat unsurprisingly only 1%. [1]

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"Based on survey data collected in 117 countries and territories from 2008 to 2024, we estimate that about 1% of people who are raised Muslim leave the faith. This loss is offset by a comparable influx of people joining Islam."

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Wiki has a nice table on Islam in particular here. [2] They broke 10% of the world population sometime around 1820. They broke 20% 170 years later, around 1990. And they're expected to to break 30% about 60 years after that, by 2050. We're trending towards a majority Muslim world, simply because of fertility, all the while people not having children somehow think people in the future will somehow share their values.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/10/islam-was...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth#Histo...

Not really, if you look at the actual birth rates, it maps to economic success more than religious identity.

Yes, we all know that global population growth is mainly happening in Africa and other poor countries.

You also cite global retention rates for islam. Those retention rates are memetic and highly dependent on the same set of poorer, non-western countries so you are comparing applyes to oranges. If you look at western countries, the retention rate is pretty similar.

You keep stretching statistics to reinforce your world view without trying to actually understand the statistics, which is why I assume you keep repeating garbage like "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely."

You are misinformed here. Islamic fertility rates within Europe remain high with an average of about one more child per woman. [1] This is why Muslims are expected to continue rapidly growing as an ever larger percentage of all Europeans, even in the scenario of 0 immigration. And this will continue indefinitely unless fertility rates markedly change.

The same follows in places like the US, even just amongst Christians. [2] See the first figure (about 2/5ths of the way down the study) for an extremely informative graph. Intended and actual fertility rates for those who consider religion important remains healthy - at around 2.5 children. For those who it is not important or have no religion, it's around 1.5 children.

It's easy to just handwave the fertility rate of developed economies while failing to consider the issue that fertility isn't just a random distribution within these countries. It's extremely biased, and religiosity is one of the most predictive factors.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow...

[2] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2723861/

> unless fertility rates markedly change.

Which seems highly likely. Fertility rates change far faster than they influence population demographics.

> It's extremely biased, and religiosity is one of the most predictive factors.

If you ignore income, education, economic opportunity and how many generations ago the family immigrated and all the other important factors.

You keep trying to paint a simplistic picture of a complex dynamic.

You have, and continue to, make endlessly false claims, only to shift the goal posts onto more false claims each time you're debunked, with plentiful ad hominem on top.

If you would like to continue this discussion then (1) acknowledge the falsehoods you make instead of just endlessly shifting the goal posts and (2) in order to prevent an endless series of #1, cite things instead of continuing to just 'invent' false facts. And I mean actual data, not some Ted Talk, Reddit, pop media, or wherever you're getting much of the nonsense you're saying like calling Islamic fertility rates 'memetic' or now deciding to claim that fertility rates change faster than they effect populations which is going absurdly far off the deep end.

So if you have some meaningful citations for these things, great. Perhaps I can see what you missed - maybe you yourself might even see that. Or maybe indeed I'm the one missing something. But otherwise, I can only assume that you're just randomly stating, as fact, whatever you happen to want to be true.

You means stuff like "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely"?

That statement is not only true, but a tautology. The multiplication will only cease if the fertility rate declines. For traits and values that are highly heritable, these too will consequently increase in a rate that is, at the minimum, proportional to the rate of fertility. Especially in modern times this is literally how Islam is 'spreading', and it's spreading rapidly, everywhere.

And bear in mind that fertility is an exponential system, in both increases and decreases. So groups that are removing themselves from the gene pool will do so with a rapidity that is quite counter-intuitive. Like a fertility rate of 1 doesn't sound that insane (it obviously translates to literally every single woman having one child on average), yet it results in a generational decline of 50%, with a generation tending to be around our window of fertility - about 20 years.

So imagine two groups start at 16 people and one group maintains a fertility rate of 1, and the other group maintains a fertility rate of 3. After just 5 generations, about a century, the low fertility group will have 1 person, and the higher fertility group will have 81. You went from equal size to an 8100% difference, after a single century! And that's with fertility levels that are entirely realistic and not just comparing extremes like Nigeria or South Korea.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/06/why-musli...

Your understanding of the statistics is lacking.

A 84% reproductive cultural "replacement rate" means that in order to maintain the population protestants need to have an average of 2.38 (2/0.84) kids to have the same number of protestants in the next generation.

The real number is actually much higher than that because what you really need is to measure how many children of two protestants also marry a protestant. This percentage is lower than (pew estimates this as 75%) so now you need to have have an average of 3.17 (2/(.83*.75) kids just to maintain the protestant population.

These are, of course, woefully inaccurate numbers and exclude all kinds of factors. The reason I present them isn't to try to estimate what the numbers are but to make it clear that "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely" is not simply not anywhere near true. You just can't accurately estimate the growth rate of a cultural identity by looking at the birth rate.

> For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%.

That's not what the science says. The rates of transmission are only slightly higher and definitely don't approach 100%.

These transmission rates also aren't "natural laws" but contigent effects that are driven by any of a number of different cultural, religious, economic and legal factors.

Even if a minority cultural identity does manage to grow through reproductive practices, it can still be fragmented by schisms (especially common with religious identity) or out competed by memetically superior identities that pulls converters from a wide range of cultural identities.

Your view is here is incredibly simplistic and ignores all kinds of basic evidence from throughout history.

I'm enjoying these conversations but kind of having really similar conversations in a number of different threads - so let me link to this [1] as a response, and would prefer if we could continue there. One of the few times I miss the old school non-threaded forums!

Anyhow, that link gets into the exact rate of transfer for Islam, the consequent growth over time, and so on. I think you'll be surprised!

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44959480