Quote Originally Posted by leo9 View Post
OK, no need for sarcasm, I read a bit, that's all. I'm sorry if it came over as pontificating.
No sarcasm intended. I was honestly serious. I, too, read and I enjoy reading history. But my focus tends to be more on military history rather than religious history. Though sometimes there is a distressing overlap among them.

I was thinking of Western Europe, which is the focus of the author's dated view of atheism as the "evolutionary" end of the process of philosophical maturity.
That makes a little more sense, then. Thank you.

but the more flaky they are, the more they contradict the author's core thesis of a natural evolution away from spirituality of any kind.
Yeah, I'm not sure I go along with his concept of it being an evolution. It's evolution which has inflicted the ability to accept spirituality as a valid view of the world, rather than as the fantasy it really is.

(apart from Islam, which is growing almost purely by population growth)
Islam is the modern equivalent of the Roman Church during the dark ages: believe or die. While there has been some tolerance of other faiths in recent decades, for many years after the founding of the religion, and increasingly around the world today, there was little to no tolerance. We are again seeing non-Muslims being harassed and killed for no good reason other than the fact that they are not Muslim. And once you ARE Muslim, whether through conversion or birth, the penalty for apostasy is death. Pretty easy to keep people in the faith that way.

he cannot recognise something as a religion if it doesn't have such signifiers as a Holy Book, a prophet (preferably long dead) and a priestly hierarchy.
Not surprising. There don't seem to be many theists who would recognize that as a religion. Yet those same theist will claim that Atheism is a religion, despite the lack of any of them.

And yet, it's exactly the people at the cutting edge of materialist rationalism, the highly educated, the IT guys and engineers and technical writers and the like, who are most likely to have a shrine to the Triple Goddess in their living room or a besom by the front door.
But how much of that is fad behavior? Playing at paganism, or satanism, because it's what all the interesting people do. Kind of like making sure you serve the socially accepted brand of wine, or have the socially accepted reading material on your coffee table. When all of their friends are espousing Paganism, how many people would be willing to risk losing those friends to buck the trend?