Rather than finding another way to have a food fight, the whole point of this posting was that irreligion is happening anyway, for whatever motive. We're globally moving away from religion, whatever the actions of a few.

1 of his important points is how bizarre religion looks from outside.

I remember as a kid, the official church service seemed bizarre & insufferable (despite an occasional memorable good point from a preacher), whereas the tiny Sunday School study group seemed to be at least somewhat interesting - and more resembles a typical Meetup from Meetup.com or similar, rather than an officially ordained religious ceremony.

And this point says it's much harder for a culture to take on another culture's religion - the 60's infatuation with India aside.

And it can be recognized that the dilution of your own culture will bring the dilution of its religion, and for some a feeling of unease and things falling apart. There might be a revival, but with the globalization mix of all things together, it's becoming harder and harder to be truly surprised. If religion rises again, it will more likely (IMHO) be from careful control and targeting of misinformation than a natural acceptance of what makes sense, rationally or intuitionally.

I suppose religion has always been closely tied to peer pressure and group beliefs, sometimes critical persuasion, sometimes shared hallucination (such as some famous sighting of miracles), along with a way to explain unexplained events. We've come a long way from "The End of War as We Know It" in the late 1800's, and our ability to slice & dice, deconstructive analysis, is much greater, even though Google and others have taught us the beauty of aggregated data for creating possibilities that weren't there in small numbers.

1 factor that I didn't see mentioned in the talk is that with all the increased interconnectedness and scope of events in the last 2 centuries, there doesn't to the untrained observer seem a lot of places where some beneficient all-knowing creator put his/her thumb on the scale to make things better. It seems strange that the flooding of the world and parting of the Red Sea happened so often (well, over a few thousand years), but now all our prominent events are this person figuring out X, that group legislating Y, and of course some madman (typically male) pushing some Z kind of inhumanity and genocide. Sometimes things got better by a God-inspired person(s) working hard and cleverly, but often God's still used on the wrong side of history.

And if God wanted to make a difference, s/he could have certainly stepped in quicker. Perhaps God's a no-drama Obama type that wants to stay in the background, but that's hardly a way to get a larger following and increase confidence in method, as Barack himself surely realizes. Without a big hole in our explanations that the Hubble telescope or Google/internet or nanotech or some other human cleverness can't give a reasonable hand-waving attempt at deciphering, there's not a critical need for God in the big stuff at least. And people tend to be driven by the big stuff, even if it's not as big as they feel it is (Halo effect, availability, other psychological factors coming into play).

Perhaps God doesn't die, but just fades out due to not enough Likes or even Web hits. I'm sure another social media site or similar phenomenon will rise in his place. After all, if s/he didn't exist, we'd be forced to create her. And we're always creating new monsters and bright shiny things.

Oh, and much religion and philosophy comes out of boredom - people with a lot of time and room to think and *an absence of explanation and recourse to possible solutions/answers/explanations*. Those conditions seem in short supply these days (while tech & fitness & other activities fill part of that religious void & longing & inquisitiveness and loneliness), though maybe when the robots come we'll get a new religious fervor. Perhaps the first robot messiah?

Paper books may never die, but there's good reason to believe the balance is already shifting to digital format and that our consumption of novels per capital is much lower than pre-TV times. Religion largely existed from oral traditions, when ritual took the place of just a few forms of social entertainment (plays, small minstrel acts...). In the 1960's/70's, music with lyrics largely put poetry to death and became a major source for transmitting ideas and received wisdom. This role of ideas in music has faded greatly since say 1989-1992 (when subversive music helped The Wall/Soviet Union fall) and instead it's fallen into a more routine dance/entertainment role bolstered with social media gossip, including related non-music fashion entertainment like the Kardashians. It begs the question whether starting a religion was much harder in the old days, or whether the level of commitment in these modern pseudo-religions is simply so much lower that they're not comparable. Still, they seem to serve many of the same functions.