Doltologist: As Dawkins predicts, deity-based religions will disappear and be dispatched to the waste paper bin of history within a generation.
You are being sold a load of goods that will never take place. Richard Dawkins makes his money by selling something he knows will not happen even in a hundred generations. He is laughing his way to the bank unless of course he truly believes what he is saying and in that case he is just as deluded and naive as he claims the religious are.
Religion has been woven into the sociological DNA of mankind so deeply and intricately that to remove it as quickly as you have apparently been led to believe would be to cast the earth in such turmoil as never seen in the history of mankind.
What will the world governments do with billions of dirt poor people who today have little to no hope of getting out of their miserable state of poverty but would then also lose any hope of a better life after death? Imagine the poor in India, Imagine the poor in South America. The poor in Africa. No religion, no hope, no control, nothing but the present which for many is a life hard to live.
Dawkins is not stupid. He knows the governments of the world cannot for long allow anarchy and hopelessness take root in billions of people. Governments need religion. It has always been that way and will always be that way.
Call it what you will...pacification or respect for traditions. Either way the governments of the world must either give the majority of their people a good life now (which they cannot) or allow them to hope for a good life later. They cannot give them a rotten life now and no life later. It won't work. Religion fills a need that government cannot provide. Religion gives hope. Government uses that hope, government needs that hope.
Take away religion in the world and when the governments fail to provide for the people they will turn to someone who will offer them hope. A new religion will form and promise hope and people will flock to it. This is the way we are. You believe evolution made us? Fine, then accept the fact that evolution put within most people the need to worship a higher power. The need for hope in a better life to come. If you believe in evolution then evolution is the cause of this hope.
Dawkins false hope will not take hold in the billions around the world who believe in God or multiple gods. He is leading a happy line of people who, living mostly in the comfortable west, cannot understand the deep-seated satisfaction that religion and religious practices/traditions bring to billions around the world. They will not let it go.
You are being misled.
Frank