& The Faith Instinct
here), religion allowed mankind to live in groups and form societies. It provided the first laws beginning with the hunter-gatherers. As such, religion has not been eliminated as much as it's being replaced by other things that achieve the same purpose.In its broadest definition, everyone has a religion (in the strictest sense, all people are members of a religion of one, since no two people believe exactly the same thing). Religion is simply the sum total of one's beliefs concerning "first cause" etc. and one's sense of morality.
Atheism is, of course, a-theism, not a-religion. Zen Buddhists being an example of an a-theist religion. According to Karen Armstrong in The Case for God
, "Atheism is therefore parasitically dependent on the form of theism it seems to eliminate." In other words, atheism doesn't exist in a vacuum, American atheism, for example, is opposed to and shaped by Christian Fundamentalism.To me, and I imagine many others of the Liberal and Progressive religious ilk, contemporary atheists are at least as irritating as Fundamentalists because they share the same zeal for evangelizing and the same dogmatism. Therefore, I don't see atheism replacing theism any time soon, if ever, more likely, since most people care a great deal less about religion than either atheists or Fundamentalists, I see organized religion dying a quiet death to be replaced by "personal beliefs" and quiet agnosticism.
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