“How do religions die? Generally they don’t, which probably explains why there’s so little literature on the subject.”
Bret Stephens comments in the Wall Street Journal:
Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can’t kill what wasn’t there to begin with.
Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it’s worth asking what.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen…
Global warming/climate change has a junk science predecessor, eugenics. Like global warming, it hit the media in the early 30’s and was trumpeted around the world. It became the topic de jour and the media was obsessed with it. States around the nation passed “eugenics” (forced sterilization laws) which have only recently been repealled. Anyone that did not meet the “well born” criteria, minorities, poor people, single mothers regardless of how they got that way were forceably sterilized. Just this month another lawsuit over this henious practice was finally settled and I understand there are others waiting in the dockets. It took WW2 and the haulocaust to finally discredit it. Even Jonas Saulk fought it in the late 40’s as he tried to develop a vaccine for polio, the eugenicists tried to discredit and destroy his career for claiming it was caused by a virus instead of defective genes. Like global warmers, they became dirty and desperate as their scheme began to unravel.