The Dregs of Religion

In order for the idea of "extreme" or "extremist" to have any meaning, you'd need examples of things or people that are ordinary. The reason being, you'd need ordinary to be able to show the contrast between "ordinary" and "extreme". This is just common sense.

Thus, the entirety of a group of people, by definition, cannot be "extremist". It makes zero sense, and so, when Christians and Muslims say, "We're not all extremists!", they are stating the obvious. Non-theists and those who speak out against religion already know that not all religious people are extremist nut-jobs. So, when/if you hear someone say this, feel free to point this out to them.

Moving on, the fastest growing religion is, you guessed it....non-religion. There's a pattern, though, and I can attest to this pattern, based, both on my own deconversion, and also having had literally thousands of conversations with others who've left the faith. Of course, there's usually exceptions to every rule, so I don't pretend to know every person's journey out of faith, but by and large, when it comes to Christianity, should doubt and/or cognitive dissonance occur within staunch believers who believe that the Bible is infallible, the process of working through these doubts is gradual and it happens in increments.

For instance, when believers get confronted with scientific facts that directly contradict their Bibles, say, for instance, the age of the universe, one of two things usually happens; either they are forced to look for ways to get around the contradictions, or they cling even harder to their faith---or as some would say, they jam their fingers in their ears and say, "Ah-la-la-la-lah...I can't hear you!".

So, yes, there are millions of Bible-believing Christians who accept the scientific explanation for the age of the universe, as there are millions who accept the theory (and fact) of evolution by natural selection. If, say, someone points out how the doctrine of "Hell" is immoral, the same applies. That is, if the new information causes dissonance in the believer's mind, one of two things will usually happen, which are, they'll either look for ways around it..e.g...say that "Hell" isn't a literal place or attempt to water it down and say it means "annihilation", OR, again, they'll cling to their faith even harder, possibly saying things like, "Sin must be punished!", "We send ourselves to Hell!", and the like.

For many people, myself included, the former approach quells doubts for a while, but it eventually fails, usually because there simply aren't any good reasons to believe that Christianity is true in any objective sense. The bits that we can salvage might be nice for a while, but even those aren't anything exclusive to the Christian faith. In other words, some of us can get "Christian Lite" to "work" for a while, but eventually even that gets ditched because it becomes indistinguishable from plain ol' water.

So, getting to the point-----we can reason together and see that a gradual progression is taking place, a progression by which, eventually, the only religious people left standing will be the most staunch, most dogmatic, most impervious to reason people out there.

And where will the religious "extremists" fit into all of this? It's a no brainer---they'll comfortably fit in right along side the above-mentioned people. What we'll be staring at are the dregs of religion, and I contend that it should be cause for concern. Who will be left to combat this highly foreseeable problem? Who? Will it be the apathetic atheists who hold to weak atheism? Will it be the passive, non-vocal agnostics? Hmmm....