I don't think it's possible just for the fact that people are very stubborn when it comes to religion. You'd have to basically brainwash millions of people into conformity to your beliefs. To me it'd be like trying to explain my satanist beliefs to a radical christian. Whether or not they say they understand, they never truely will. It'd be a lot of work just make everyone the same.

Plus, I always enjoy those conversations with the religious people... It makes life fun and full of debate.

I agree that it is impossible...
Also, I don't really want to apostisize many people (though it is nice to help people out).
Mostly, I want them to keep their religion out of our laws..

It's not as impossible as you guys think, however to some degree I agree. I would rather remain optimistic. Check out this promising news story posted at RRS board:

By Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times

Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.

At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement.

Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation.

While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it “the 4 percent panic attack”), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers.

“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”

The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”

Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett.

Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual “hooking up” approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.

Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their “Biblical values” by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.

When Eric Soto, 18, transferred from a small charter school to a large public high school in Chicago, he said he was disappointed to find that an extracurricular Bible study attracted only five to eight students. “When we brought food, we thought we could get a better turnout,” he said. They got 12.

Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, “At school I don’t have a lot of friends who are Christians.”

Ms. Dunford spoke late last month as she and her small church youth group were about to join more than 3,400 teenagers in a sports arena at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for a Christian youth extravaganza and rock concert called Acquire the Fire.

“A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,” said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with “tlw,” for “true love waits,” to remind herself of her pledge not to have premarital sex.

She said her friends were more prone to use profanity and party than she was, and added: “It’s scary sometimes. You get made fun of.”

To break the isolation and bolster the teenagers’ commitment to a conservative lifestyle, Mr. Luce has been organizing these stadium extravaganzas for 15 years. The event in Amherst was the first of 40 that Teen Mania is putting on between now and May, on a breakneck schedule that resembles a road trip for a major touring band. The “roadies” are 700 teenagers who have interned for a year at Teen Mania’s “Honor Academy” in Garden Valley, Tex.

More than two million teenagers have attended in the last 15 years, said Mr. Luce, a 45-year-old, mop-headed father of three with a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard and the star power of an aging rock guitarist.

“That’s more than Paul McCartney has pulled in,” Mr. Luce asserted, before bounding onstage for the opening pyrotechnics and a prayer.

For the next two days, the teenagers in the arena pogoed to Christian bands, pledged to lead their friends to Christ and sang an anthem with the chorus, “We won’t be silent.” Hundreds streamed down the aisles for the altar call and knelt in front of the stage, some weeping openly as they prayed to give their lives to God.

The next morning, Mr. Luce led the crowd in an exercise in which they wrote on scraps of paper all the negative cultural influences, brand names, products and television shows that they planned to excise from their lives. Again they streamed down the aisles, this time to throw away the “cultural garbage.”

Trash cans filled with folded pieces of paper on which the teenagers had scribbled things like Ryan Seacrest, Louis Vuitton, “Gilmore Girls,” “Days of Our Lives,” Iron Maiden, Harry Potter, “need for a boyfriend” and “my perfect teeth obsession.” One had written in tiny letters: “fornication.”

Some teenagers threw away cigarette lighters, brand-name sweatshirts, Mardi Gras beads and CD’s — one titled “I’m a Hustla.”

“Lord Jesus,” Mr. Luce prayed into the microphone as the teenagers dropped their notes into the trash, “I strip off the identity of the world, and this morning I clothe myself with Christ, with his lifestyle. That’s what I want to be known for.”

Evangelical adults, like believers of every faith, fret about losing the next generation, said the Rev. David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology of Emory University, in Atlanta.

“The uniqueness of the evangelical situation is the fact that during the 80’s and 90’s you had the Reagan revolution that was growing the evangelical churches,” Mr. Key said.

Today, he said, the culture trivializes religion and normalizes secularism and liberal sexual mores.

The phenomenon may not be that young evangelicals are abandoning their faith, but that they are abandoning the institutional church, said Lauren Sandler, author of “Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement” (Viking, 2006). Ms. Sandler, who calls herself a secular liberal, said she found the movement frighteningly robust.

“This generation is not about church,” said Ms. Sandler, an editor at Salon.com. “They always say, ‘We take our faith outside the four walls.’ For a lot of young evangelicals, church is a rock festival, or a skate park or hanging out in someone’s basement.”

Contradicting the sense of isolation expressed by some evangelical teenagers, Ms. Sandler said, “I met plenty of kids who told me over and over that if you’re not Christian in your high school, you’re not cool — kids with Mohawks, with indie rock bands who feel peer pressure to be Christian.”

The reality is, when it comes to organizing youth, evangelical Christians are the envy of Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and Jews, said Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, who specializes in the study of American evangelicals and surveyed teens for his book “Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual lives of American Teenagers” (Oxford, 2005).

Mr. Smith said he was skeptical about the 4 percent statistic. He said the figure was from a footnote in a book and was inconsistent with research he had conducted and reviewed, which has found that evangelical teenagers are more likely to remain involved with their faith than are mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews and teenagers of almost every other religion.

“A lot of the goals I’m very supportive of,” Mr. Smith said of the new evangelical youth campaign, “but it just kills me that it’s framed in such apocalyptic terms that couldn’t possibly hold up under half a second of scrutiny. It’s just self-defeating.”

The 4 percent is cited in the book “The Bridger Generation” by Thom S. Rainer, a Southern Baptist and a former professor of ministry. Mr. Rainer said in an interview that it came from a poll he had commissioned, and that while he thought the methodology was reliable, the poll was 10 years old.

“I would have to, with integrity, say there has been no significant follow-up to see if the numbers are still valid,” Mr. Rainer said.

Mr. Luce seems weary of criticism that his message is overly alarmist. He said that a current poll by the well-known evangelical pollster George Barna found that 5 percent of teenagers were Bible-believing Christians. Some criticize Mr. Barna’s methodology, however, for defining “Bible-believing” so narrowly that it excludes most people who consider themselves Christians.

Mr. Luce responded: “If the 4 percent is true, or even the 5 percent, it’s an indictment of youth ministry. So certainly they’re going to want different data.”

Outside the arena in Amherst, the teenagers at Mr. Luce’s Acquire the Fire extravaganza mobbed the tables hawking T-shirts and CD’s stamped: “Branded by God.” Mr. Luce’s strategy is to replace MTV’s wares with those of an alternative Christian culture, so teenagers will link their identity to Christ and not to the latest flesh-baring pop star.

Apparently, the strategy can show results. In Chicago, Eric Soto said he returned from a stadium event in Detroit in the spring to find that other teenagers in the hallways were also wearing “Acquire the Fire” T-shirts.

“You were there? You’re a Christian?” he said the young people would say to one another. “The fire doesn’t die once you leave the stadium. But it’s a challenge to keep it burning.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/us/06evangelical.html

It is completely impossible to rid the country of all religon/religous beliefs/interests/people/churches/statements/ideas/ect.

Just as we are strong on our belief that there is no God and religion is pointless, others are strong on their belief that there is a God and that "He is watching everything we do".

But, by using intellect you can convert a strong religious person to seeing the many holes in his or her religion and understanding why logical thought is just.. well.. the logical thing to do besides wasting a lifetime worshipping a false idol in hopes of reaching a paradise instead of spending your life creating your own paradise by living freely.

the only way to free ourselves of the relgious...would be to nuke every house in the nation...since we dont want to do that then there is no realistic way...but i have a felling in 3-4 generations religion will play a much lesser role in the world....think about it....people are becoming more and more intelligent ( except for me I cant spell xD) and soon there wont be a need for religion at all

Funny so many "freethinkers" want to restrict the global perspective down to thier personal belief.

To question everything is to deny a LOT.

If you don't have constants and values that aren't questioned, then what footing do you have? At what point do you stop questioning your own existence? Do you take the fact that you're ABLE to question as an objective starting point?

[quote]Funny so many "freethinkers" want to restrict the global perspective down to thier personal belief.[/quote]
I also find this incredibly ironic. It's only freethinking if you think a certain way.

I think a new motto for the Fundamentalist Atheists is in order:

"You're Only Thinking For Yourself If You Think [i]Just Like Us[/i]! (TM)"

~P-Dunn

[quote]I think that we are open to new Ideas, We just defend our positions.

I honestly beleved In God, Now I don't. I do change my position when I think I have been proven wrong which is more than many people can say - Freethinking dosent mean so much acceptance of Ideas as the ability to think for yourself. (I think that a Christian who has seriously considered each side is "freethinking" - as long as they dont try to force others to think like them (debate is fine))[/quote]
Thanks for that, Guruite.

Many atheists are the same way you are, and I respect that. I consider both sides of every argument before making a decision, and so by your definition, I'm also a "freethinker." Yet, I'm a Christian.

Unfortunately, there also are many atheists who are very intolerant of religious beliefs. They parade their "freethinking" attitude around like it's some sort of prize, condeming everything else as "irrational" or claim that we "don't have evidence" for our beliefs. But wait, if they find that you're an atheist too, their attitude changes and they respect you once again. They're not open to the other side at all. These are the same kinds of people who harshly criticized Anthony Flew for his deconversion from atheism to deism. I like to call these people Fundamentalist Atheists, but there are several types of those too.

~P-Dunn

I find this amusing, I said in recent posts I am no perfect christian but like you guys I am fighting but against the lies that are being told to you all. You may say, " Bold statement... lies being told to us all." Well it is I know but its funny how things are being centered around christianity overall. There must be a serious threat we pose to have you guys wanting to rid us other then the excuses you give about the illogical thought of God and stuff.
You don't like the morals God tries to set for you? I found this online and check this out
Is Atheism a Crutch?

Gregory Koukl

divider

Some say Christianity is just a crutch. But let's turn the question on its edge for a moment. Is atheism an emotional crutch, wishful thinking? The ax cuts both ways.

Perhaps atheists are rejecting God because they've had a bad relationship with their father. Instead of inventing God, have atheists invented non-God? Have they invented atheism to escape some of the frightening implications of God's existence? Think about it.

[quote=Christfolyfe] I find this amusing, I said in recent posts I am no perfect christian but like you guys I am fighting but against the lies that are being told to you all. You may say, " Bold statement... lies being told to us all." Well it is I know but its funny how things are being centered around christianity overall. There must be a serious threat we pose to have you guys wanting to rid us other then the excuses you give about the illogical thought of God and stuff.
You don't like the morals God tries to set for you? I found this online and check this out
Is Atheism a Crutch?

Gregory Koukl

divider

Some say Christianity is just a crutch. But let's turn the question on its edge for a moment. Is atheism an emotional crutch, wishful thinking? The ax cuts both ways.

Perhaps atheists are rejecting God because they've had a bad relationship with their father. Instead of inventing God, have atheists invented non-God? Have they invented atheism to escape some of the frightening implications of God's existence? Think about it.

[/quote]

This reeks of the studies saying gays were rejected by the opposite sex, or had overbearing fathers, or were abused. I don't see how atheism is a wishful thinking. I would find the idea of a God very comforting. For example, it would be nice to think that people will be punished for their misactions, and that good people will be rewarded. I just don't see any evidence for that.

ooooh! preach it brotha! Yeah I just wanted to say that. I imagined someone slapping you with ice on their hands. I understand the fantasy novels and video games thing entirely.

Its kinda physically impossible, and unethical. Everyone has the right to believe or not to believe and taking that away breaks the Bill of Rights. Though, it would be nice to have an atheist nation, its not going to happen in our lifetime, maybe or grandchildren's generation, people are still to binded to religion rather than science.

I think that it will end up with people who just want to believe by faith, but have little doctrine or history to back them up and people who do not believe by faith.