> I don't think we are going to buck the lessons of thousands of years of human history and find some kind of "enlightened secularism" that hasn't worked before

> I don't think we are going to buck the lessons of thousands of years of human history and find some kind of "enlightened secularism" that hasn't worked before. this is a rather ethnocentric view of religion based on what is clearly a limited historical understanding evidently informed mostly by judeo-christianity. just to pick one counter-example: the ancient greeks sought virtue and purpose from philosophical inquiry, not from their religious practices, which were much more transactional.