Published: March 14, 2009 10:49 am      

No worries: Religion isn't dying yet

Forget the shrinking economy, my friends. We've got a real problem.

In what can only be termed a shocking development, a study of religious life in America released Monday revealed that our nation is down to its last 228 million Christians.

Yup, the American Religious Identification Survey reported that of the 300 million or so people in the United States, the number of those who say they're Christian has plummeted from 77 percent in 2001 to ... well ... 76 percent today.

This dire news has been a very big deal all over the national and local media all week. I'm no whiz at math, but I figure that if this one-percentage-point-every-eight years trend continues, we will be flat out of Christians in a scant 608 years.

And what about the Jews?

According to reputable polling, my people account for only 1.7 percent to 2.5 percent of the U.S. population. That pretty much amounts to just me and all the members of President Obama's economic advisory team.

What a lot of folks found most alarming about the recent survey is the meteoric rise over the last eight years in the number of people who profess to have no religion at all.

That's right, that percentage has rocketed from 14.2 percent to an astronomical ... um ... 15 percent.

Wowzers!

At this rate, our beloved country will be devoid of Christians and Jews _ not to mention Muslims and Hindus _ in about ... well, by my best calculations ...

Never.

OK, not quite never.

In about 7.5 billion years, according to two prominent University of Washington astrobiologists, Earth will be reduced to a cinder, and humans will have been gone long before that.

In their book, "The Life and Death of Planet Earth," Donald Brownlee and Peter Ward say that in about a billion years, the sun will expand to the point of wiping out all plant and animal life on the planet.

Mankind wouldn't _ you should pardon the expression _ have a prayer under those circumstances.

That would seem just as well, given that in the billions of years that follow, the oceans will vaporize, then the sun will engulf our world and send all its molecules and atoms floating off into space.

So, we've got a billion years _ more or less. That's quite a relief. I was worried that we'd only have a million.

At any rate, I figure that at the end of those billion years, that's when we'll see the end of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, not before.

And by then, who knows? We might have traveled to distant worlds, and to think that we wouldn't take our religions with us is absurd.

"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence," wrote the late British philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell. "It will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines."

With apologies to Mr. Russell, I don't believe that. We need our religions too much. We need to believe that when it comes to perfection, man is not the last word on the subject.

I also don't see any real contradiction between reason and science and religion, as long as each respects the differences between fact and faith.

Astronomers tell us that the universe is billions and billions of years old. If some folks want to believe instead that it's only 5,000 years old, there's no harm in that ... as long as they don't insist on equal _ or for that matter, any _ space in school science textbooks.

I respect those who profess to be atheists, and for all I know, they could be absolutely right. Certainly, among a lot of young people I've met, atheism seems to be rather chic.

But it has been chic before, and somehow through the ages, for better or worse, religion has been passed along from generation to generation.

I kind of think it's for the better, if only that you rarely see organizations with names like "Atheists Children's Relief Fund" or "United Agnostics Appeal."

For all the awful things that have been done by people in the name of religion, there has been far more good.

No, I don't think we'll be running out of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus or those who practice other major faiths any time soon. And we're unlikely to see a shortage of atheists and agnostics, either.

And that's just the way it ought to be.

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Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 432-1000, ext. 208.