[jcadam]

It's all self correcting in the long run, I say.

A non-increasing population leads to economic stagnation (at best). That, coupled with a decline in religiosity leading to a loss of societal cohesion will eventually bring down the whole house of cards that is modern civilization.

Famine, war, etc. follows. And we're back to a less populated world with high infant mortality again. Hard times lead to a return to religiosity and large families.

Hopefully this all happens after I'm gone.

[oblio]

> A non-increasing population leads to economic stagnation (at best).

Kind of like in agriculture, there's "intensive" economic growth and "extensive" economic growth. Intensive being when the same number of people are more productive and extensive being when you have more people.

You can have economic growth with a stable population. Heck, Romania's having economic growth while its population is declining! (a population loss of about 10% in the last 15 years, during which time its economy doubled)

[simonh]

What makes you believe secularism leads to reduced social cohesion? Surely it eliminates a source of friction between religious groups?

[antepodius]

Suppose every member of a small town went to church every sunday. Everyone interacts with everyone else in the area, for a bit.

You don't get that in secular society.

[oblio]

There's many ways to socialize and few of them are religious. I'm willing to bet we had parties way before we invented religion ;)

[antepodius]

Harvest festivals were religious- or at least tied up in religion.

You can't just take a core element of a heavy intertwined, complex system without collateral damage. It's like deleting a file in a spaghetti codebase. Half the codebase interacts with any given file in some way or other.