Religion is slowly becoming more "secular" with each passing generation. We are so used to thinking of secular and theistic forces as being opposites and adversaries of each other, but it seems there is a lot more intermixing of these two than people initially think.
For every bin Laden or Fred Phelps in the world, there are countless other theists practicing (or believing, but not practicing) a sort of "diet" form of their parent religion, one that cobbles together religious and secular values in a sort of schizophrenic manner. Under close examination, however, these beliefs make no sense at all, but has been adopted out of convenience and for the sake of civility and social order.
I think the best example of this is the idea of "religious pluralism." In Western religions such as Islam and Christianity, there is really no theological justification for letting people believe as they may. In fact, Islam specifically calls for the domination of their faith across the world. I'll illustrate this issue with an analogy (let's assume Christianity is true here for the sake of arguement):
Say there was a man that was about to kill 1000 people, and you had the means to stop him. Would you? Of course, it would be your moral imperative to do so.
Now let's say this man was a preacher of a non-Christian belief, whether it be Islam, Hinduism, Atheism, etc. This man's persuasiveness will lead 1000 people away from Christianity. While this may not seem like a big deal, their turning away from their faith equates to their own spiritual death and damnation into hell. Whereas in the previous example the people would merely lose out on living in *this* world (and yet still be able to go to heaven), these 1000 people would be doomed to eternal torment, a fate far worse than murder.
Likewise, we have Christians and others that say that it's okay for people to be homosexual, even though the Bible explicitly declares this as an abomination. Or this whole Western notion of freedom via permissiveness (aka negative freedom), which goes against the idea of following God's law.
It seems that we are seeing religion slowly wither away, not in the sense of being gone completely, but in the sense of basically changing itself to conform to secular ideas, to the point where it becomes indistinguishable save for a few vestigial superstitions.
