(I'm going to read this post in three years and cringe, I just know it.)
I submit that religion serves a purpose completely independent of its truthfulness (after all, there are many religions out there which contradict other religions). There's this saying that there are atheists with a God-shaped hole in their hearts (#notAllX). There's always this talk of "find your passion" and so forth. Time after time, it's found that people function best with community and when doing things to help others. These are not strictly the providence of religion, but some of them--Christianity in particular--have certainly gotten better at it than most substitutes.
Then we have culture wars and morality debates and everyone telling everyone else why they're wrong, which we'd have without religion because we'd still have politics. And we'd have it without politics because we'd still have clans and tribes and subdivisions and families and cliques.
The big three evangelistic religions--Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism--did an interesting thing, by filling that need in such a way as to transcend national and ethnic and tribal divisions. They did it so well that they've remained recognizable for longer than most empires.
And yet they are three and not one, and but three of many. One can't really run a supposedly democratic republic and with one made law above all others, unless it's just that homogeneous a republic. You can't really have "kill the infidel" as a policy in a world that is overwhelming majority infidel by the same reckoning. You can pull a Tokugawa and go full isolationist (and literally send ninjas to sabotage Christian rebellions, because that happened. It was one of those "Hey, I'm Jesus's brother!" groups that has a nasty habit of springing up when Christianity reaches a new place and doesn't immediately catch on.), but that isn't going to work so well with post-war America. (By which I mean post-World Wars. American isolationism worked well enough, right up until it ended. That is not a genie you can put back into its bottle without the past century of advancement collapsing. Some might say that this is a good thing, and a techno-economic collapse would put civilization back in position to be more accepting of religion. To which I say that a god who can't withstand Twitter is hardly a god at all.)
Also, Nocturnus's talk of a democratic constitutional republic devolving to legalism hits the nail on the head, religion aside. That problem transcends political divides.
Though I kinda imagine it has to do with the arcs the pendulum has made since Communism became the great boogieman of the 20th century. The Pledge of Alegance having God inserted, then made a ritual in public events and places and schools... to unmask Communists. (Not that there weren't Soviet spies all over the place in the 1950s.)
Then came the 60s counterculture. Which devolved into the 70s. Then the reaction to the 70s brought us a dramatic reduction in crime, gains in economic prosperity, and MS DOS. And lots and lots of mass media paranoia about every little thing. Entertainment kept drifting one way, culture outside of Hollywood and the Ivory Towers drifted another, the Cold War came to an end, and the guard rails keeping the pendulum from going wild fell with the Berlin Wall. And here we are. Escalating nastiness on all sides.
Where is God in all this?
Well, the nuts in charge of fighting Communism back in the day tried to shove him down everyone's throats in the name of fighting Communism. At the same time that an enormous technological / economic / etc, etc boom hit the world. Everybody has been overreacting to everybody else ever since. Not that people weren't before, I suppose. But we probably wouldn't be having this conversation if not for the Red Scare.
What to do? Well, since blow up the world and start over is not a viable option (even if we had a Deathstar, a portal to an uninhabited Earth, and a team of well-vetted pioneers ready to do the job), I'm kinda running out of ideas.
But if we could all just agree that people can think very differently from us and not necessarily be stupid/evil/immoral/whathaveyou, that would be a start. Do not just read the previous sentence and think "Yeah, <other side of the discussion>! Stop acting like we're evil!", for that would completely miss the point. Remove the log from your own eye before removing the speck from your brother's.
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
George... Don't do that.