Idiocracy hypothesis says otherwise. The least educated and intelligent have the most numbers of offspring.

In which case 'the conscientious minority' must continue to breed to at least slow the rate of the declining percentage.

And, thankfully, geniuses randomly and repeatedly arise amongst them.

We can disincentivize it substantially by replacing tax benefits for having kids with tax burdens for having kids, promoting family planning and making contraceptives free and easily accessible as possible, making childbirth and childrearing as expensive as possible, etc.

> Religions maintain themselves purely through indoctrination prior to coherent thought, why not use that same hack for actual useful ends. (Hah! I'm such an optimist).

[Citation needed]

I've encountered several examples of people who were raised pure humanist/materialist and became one stripe or another of religious later in life, including

- Simone Weil (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil)

- my father, raised by an atheist and agnostic, was an aggressive atheist until his college years when he became a deist (he further converted to evangelical Christianity while in medical school).

- Bruce Greyson, raised a pure materialist but became vaguely spiritual and inclined towards dualism after decades of studying NDEs (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Greyson)

It may not be common to start off atheist and become theistic, but it does happen.

My sister is a born again Christian, so it's not true for her either, but it's definitely true for her kids.

Imma keep working on em though ;)