We’re talking adults, not children. If you’re old enough to go to war and be treated as an adult by society, you can choose whether to have children. Children regretted is far worse than children not had regretted, in my opinion. ~40% of annual US and global pregnancies are unintended (the percentage that are unintended and unwanted is unknown).
Choices have consequences, but humans have the right to make their choices, hopefully fully informed. Who are we to tell someone their reproductive choice was wrong? That’s their decision. You can do everything right and still lose. That’s life.
Different cultures prioritise different things. Some cultures prioritise individual choice over reproduction, others prioritise reproduction over individual choice. What's going to happen in the long-run? The culture that prioritises individual choice will shrink, the culture that prioritises reproduction will boom.
A good example of this is Israel - the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox), roughly 13% of Israel's population, prioritise large families over individual choice, and are booming; secular Jews, (by and large) do the opposite, and while currently around 40% of Israel's population, are slowly shrinking; it is predicted that in 2065, close to 50% of all Israeli children will be from Haredi families, only 35% from non-Haredi Jewish families (secular or moderately religious).
Over time, everyone becomes atheistic. Not having children is a function of a society's wealth (which is then correlated to education which is the correlated to non-religiosity), not (necessarily) their religiosity. It is not that most of the children who are born from reproduction-heavy religions will continue the practice, as we have seen in human history, when people have been much more religious than now.
In fact, I see this attitude so often online that I believe it's some sort of logical fallacy akin to the Malthusian trap, that "they" (for some definition of "they" as chosen by the doomer) will eventually take over lest we reprioritize having kids, when in reality the entire world's population is dropping, and it's distributed mostly equally, even in areas where there are some of the highest birth rates in the world historically, like India, China, and Nigeria.
It isn't universally true. There is no evidence the Haredim are becoming atheistic, nor the Old Order Amish. Yes, there are defectors from both (mostly not to atheism, mostly to more moderate versions of the respective religion), but not enough to counteract the high birth rates.
> Not having children is a function of a society's wealth (which is then correlated to education which is the correlated to non-religiosity), not (necessarily) their religiosity.
The Exclusive Brethren [0] are notoriously well-off, yet they continue to have large families, and there's no evidence of a high defection rate of their children.
> when in reality the entire world's population is dropping, and it's distributed mostly equally, even in areas where there are some of the highest birth rates in the world historically, like India, China, and Nigeria.
According to OECD data, [1] in 2005, Israel's TFR was 2.84. By 2017, it had grown to 3.11. From there, it declined to a low of 2.90 in 2020 (probably in part COVID-related), but by 2021 had rebounded to 3.00, and I expect it will probably be above 3.00 when the 2022 data is released. Israel's TFR in 2017 (3.11) was higher than its TFR in 1981 (3.06). So Israel is at least one counterexample to the narrative of a uniform global population decline.
This is a misconception based on recent experience in the west. In the Muslim world, the trend has been the exact opposite. Neither of my grandmothers (one from a well-to-do urban family, another from a village) wore hijab. In their old age, they covered part of their hair with their sari, as is the south Asian custom: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sheikh_Hasina_Darshana_.... None of my aunts wore hijab. But several of my cousins do. There’s a video of the President of Egypt laughing at the prospect of a hijab law in 1958: https://youtu.be/brlFxRYCggE?si=jBZ97TCpz3P7LASC. Today, 90% of Egyptian women wear a headscarf.
> Not having children is a function of a society's wealth (which is then correlated to education which is the correlated to non-religiosity), not (necessarily) their religiosity.
Affluence allows individual independence, which tends to weaken religiosity. But it’s the religiosity (and social policy—in most societies, the two are closely connected) that then drives reproductive choices. Religious Pakistan has almost double the fertility rate of secular Bangladesh, despite similar GDP per capita. Muslim Americans have more affluence and more education, but also much higher birth rates than both white Americans generally, and non-college educated white Americans in places where that group is secular and not evangelical. West Virginia has a comparable fertility rate to Washington State or Colorado. Oregon has one of the lowest fertility rates, despite being relatively poor and rural. (In red states, you can see a stark contrast between places that are populated by descendants of Germans, or British planters, and those that are populated by Scots-Irish.)
> Religious Pakistan has almost double the fertility rate of secular Bangladesh, despite similar GDP per capita.
I agree with your overall conclusion, but nowadays Bangladesh's GDP per capita is significantly higher than Pakistan's, so that part of your argument no longer holds. And, Bangladesh's economy is now growing significantly faster than Pakistan's (in 2022, 7.1% vs 4.7%), so it seems likely that Bangladesh will keep on pulling ahead.
Religiosity rate within the Muslim world are up in the last 50 years. They call it the Islamic revival in their historgraphy. Same dynamic in Qatar, UAE and Bahrain as it is in Yemen. Wealth doesn’t automatically lead your society to abandon a belief in god. History did not and will never end.
People often argue that the real-world success/failure of an idea is evidence for its correctness or lack thereof. For example, many argue that the failure of the Soviet Union is evidence that communism is wrong; similarly, many view the decline of religion in the mainstream contemporary West as yet more evidence that religion is erroneous.
This is another instance of that type of argument: if, in the long-run, collectivist cultures grow and individualist cultures shrink, that would be evidence that collectivism is more correct than individualism.
Of course, an individual need not care about such arguments. An individual might be happy to be communist, non-communist, religious, non-religious, individualist, non-individualist, whatever, even if that was in some objective sense wrong. They might just not care if it was.
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Choices have consequences, but humans have the right to make their choices, hopefully fully informed. Who are we to tell someone their reproductive choice was wrong? That’s their decision. You can do everything right and still lose. That’s life.