I don’t think the day is coming soon when we’ll look back that people who believe
in God, you know, that was a silly age, although some of us look at this that way now. But
clearly the numbers are, you know — we’re not in the majority yet but the fastest growing
group, the fastest growing religious group so called is the nones. The N – O – N
– E – S people. Check the bock for no religious affiliation. Now they’re not necessarily
atheist or agnostics or skeptics, but they are not affiliated with a religion. And so
on one level, I don’t care what somebody believes as long as they leave me alone and
they don’t interfere with my rights. They don’t try to kill me and bother me. I mean
the JWs, the Jehovah Witnesses, they come to my door once in a while. The Mormons come
to my door once in a while. It’s kind of amusing. I invite them in and give them a
copy of Skeptic magazine and they’re like uh, we better call the head guy to come down
here. That’s relatively harmless, but clearly we see with Islam and the problem of Islamic
terrorism, religion has to be reformed. It absolutely does.
I don’t worry about the Jains or Jews or most Christians causing societal problems
anymore because they’ve gone through the reformation enlightenment, age of reason,
the scientific revolution. They came out the other side mostly nonviolent. And Islam hasn’t
— so I think if we reform Islam and then start to wean people off belief in the supernatural
altogether. You can’t do it by fiat, but we can inculcate it into people’s thinking
critical thinking about everything including God. Throw God into the mix. That’s just
another supernatural belief. And that’s what those of us who work in this area are
trying to do. You know there are different strategies. You can be aggressive about it
like Richard Dawkins and Hitch [Christopher Hitchens]. You know they’re pretty anti-theist.
That works in some cases, but not other cases. Other areas people need to be reeled in slowly,
gently. But that’s just a sales and marketing problem, you know. How should we sell our
product best? Should we call it this or we use the red logo or the blue logo? You sort
of product test those things and see what works. But we all share this overall goal.
In a century or two, I think it’s possible no one will believe in God anymore or almost
no one. And that will be good for society.