What do you think is the top reason people leave religion and spiritual paths? I think it’s science. However, I don’t think science is intentionally trying to lead people away from these things. I think it’s just happening. The only other reason I can think of would be killing in the name of religion. Are there more you can think of?
As I understand it, the great majority of cultures around the world, now and in known history, have had an origin myth or collection of myths to account for how come the world is like it is and we're all in it, including origins of the earth, its features like mountains and oceans, the weather, and so on.
So through pre-scientific eyes it would seem likely that powerful human-like agencies created these things. Tribal identity included a common language and customs and stories and heroes and folk-histories, as well as territory. Knowing these stories and recognizing their divinities also gave the tribe a manner of coping with threat, risk and adversity by petitioning these agencies for aid, and creating the prestigious caste of witch-doctors and priests.
What has been happening since the Enlightenment, starting in the 17th century, is the spread and growing prestige of 'natural philosophy' aka science, and reasoned enquiry generally. From memory it was Gould who argued that Bishop Butler's calculation (1650) from the bible that the earth was created in 4004 BCE, was, having regard to the materials available to him and the understandings of his day, excellent science. By the end of the 18th century discoveries were placing biblical creation under assault as it became evident that the earth was
much older than Ussher thought. By the 1840s Tennyson was writing poems about the stress on the old biblical understandings, and the dam really burst with Darwin's publication
The Origin of Species (1859).
The educated were of course the first to have access to debates of this kind, which in the course of the 19th century wholly altered and relatively diminished the authority of the church in England, the UK, Germany, France and other European centers of learning.
But religion as a social glue was strong up to WW2, Since then we've seen the steady diminishing of society's authority figures, the elected representatives, the experts, the press, the professors and by no means least the churches. This has been due to the coming of radio, and then TV, which means you didn't have to leave home to be entertained on your own, then the mobile phone, which meant you weren't out of communication with your social connections when on the move, up to the present where information is no further away than your fingertips. And you don't need to go to church to catch up with your social peers once a week, or at all.
So the move from belief to no-need-for-belief as a social phenomenon has been steadily increasing, and at present is much further advanced in the First World although the US still lags behind Europe.
