Why religion is never created nor destroyed in any society, but merely conserved in various guises

One advantage of a religious education these days is identifying the residue of religious thought in the atavisms of contemporary secular culture. ‘White privilege’, with its inescapable culpability and ritual self-flagellation, is the updated Catholic notion of Original Sin, wherein everyone descended from Adam (or possessing ‘whiteness’) bears an unpardonable burden.

Paleo, ketogenic, vegan: the diet-conscious fussbudget fretting over what’s in his Asian/Latin fusion pozole pho isn’t much different than any adherent of halal or kashrut.

The point isn’t the predictive power of the scientific hypothesis, but how it gets actionably internalized as religious doctrine: It’s possible to speak of objective empirical realities religiously and mythically, and that’s mostly what we do.