I stumbled across this article by Alok Jha titled, "No religion and an end to war: How thinkers see the future" and wanted to comment on it.

I mostly agree with the opinions that the article presents, however I think they are poorly represented. There are a few word-choice issues that prevent me from completely agreeing with the article or finding it at all informing. Here is the opening sentence:

People's fascination for religion and superstition will disappear within a few decades as television and the internet make it easier to get information, and scientists get closer to discovering a final theory of everything, leading thinkers argue today.

First: I don't think people's fascination for religion and superstition will ever disappear. As hopeless as religion is, people will always need a magician. I think religion will personalize and decentralize a lot more, but it will always be there. The thinkers referred to in this article are making projections for a 'few' decades. To be very liberal, let's call it 50 years. How much have we advanced in science in the last 50 years? I couldn't even quantify it, but compare that notion with the percentage of people that are still religious or theistic in the world: 92-98% [1] [2]. In my World Religions class last semester, we pinned the number of people that were religious at 95% (which we took to mean the number of people that actively entertained the existence of a god or the supernatural). I suspect that these thinkers anticipate a sharp decline in religious entertainment, but I'm reluctant to expect such a trend. Take the dissimination of information for example: in the last 50 years, information is exponentially more available to people (remember, I'm a biased American and can't articulate the circumstance of people in say, Africa).

Second: Television and the Internet will make the presentation of information easier, but I doubt more actual information will be present. For television: We have hundreds (or thousands?) of channels of mostly opinion. News television is questionable at best as it is (bias, misinformation, etc.) and with the availability of the presentation of information, I think it will be harder to decipher information. Granted, the availability of perspective will be nice, but I'm still skeptic as to whether or not it will be beneficial.

Another quote from the article:

Philosopher Daniel Denett believes that within 25 years religion will command little of the awe it seems to instil today. The spread of information through the internet and mobile phones will "gently, irresistibly, undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance".

Religion will split. There will be religious people that are hardly committed to any dogma, and those that are violently devoted to a cause. Extremism and fanaticism will become more of a minority, but it will become more intense. Unfortunately, the more science explains and discovers the more frantic the fanatics will become and a more relaxed grip on reality will surface.

More on War:

John Horgan, of the Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, was optimistic "that one day war - large-scale, organised group violence - will end once and for all".

Mr. Horgan gets very close to my opinion: large-scale violence will decrease, but War will not. Battles for intelligence will continute to reign - 'cyber' crime and the likes between nations will surge. People will see the futility in outright human violence, but havoc will ensue on economic sectors.

Perhaps I'm just a skeptic, but I doubt it. I DO have high hopes for the future and I DO think things will get a lot better for humanity, but I also think they'll get worse.