I’m not a religious person. I’m probably too individualistic, skeptical, rebellious, and contrarian for any kind of dogma, hierarchy, or groupthink. Also, I spend more time each month thinking about how I want my burger cooked than if god exists. On the other hand, there is something about the ritual, charity, and moral bravery of many faiths that I reluctantly find appealing. I say ‘reluctantly’ because I’m frequently disappointed that there is not more of a spirit of charity and volunteerism outside of the church. That is, I am disappointed that the Enlightenment seemed to lead us less toward humanism and more toward consumerism.

Over at Goodreads I published a review of my latest read, Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom. The book is essentially a history of the spread of Christianity across Europe from the division of the Roman Empire in 330 to the reconquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099. It’s fascinating to see just how much Europe changed to adapt to Christianity and how much Christianity changed to adapt to all of Europe. But there is one thing I forgot to include in my review: the irony that Europe is now the least religious region in the world. In fact, you could even make the argument that, while Christianity became dominant in the 10th and 11th centuries in Europe, it has only survived because of its impressive colonial export during the 16th and 17th centuries. Today throughout Europe churches continue to close due to falling attendance and a lack of priests. Back in 2001 Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, claimed that Christianity is nearly vanquished in Britain.

In one of the strangest twists of history, it is now up to African priests to save the souls of non-believers in Europe and North America. Trust me, if you would have told this to a priest in 15th century Italy he would have shit himself.

A couple weeks ago John Tierney of the New York Times penned an interesting blog post about the evolution of religion after having read Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures. (This topic has been in the media a lot this past year thanks to Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, Christopher Hitchen’s God is not Great, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God.)

Wade argues “that people have a genetically based urge to worship, engraved by natural selection in the mind’s neural circuits because of the tremendous advantage religion conferred on early societies.”

It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.

Tierney, noting that pious churches installed pews to discourage dancing during service, wonders if nonbelievers could develop new godless institutions that confer the evolutionary benefits of religion. He even suggests environmentalism as a possible secular, 21st century replacement to religion:

One possibility that occurs to me is a version of environmentalism, but with better music and with rituals that are more elegant than sorting garbage. A Church of Green could provide some of the same moral lessons and communal values as traditional religions, and I suspect it’s no coincidence that green fervor is especially prevalent in European countries where traditional religion is on the decline.

Meanwhile, in an interesting discussion on Bloggingheads.tv, Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus wonder if the transparent nature of the networked age is leading to a new omnipotent moral force. In other words, do we behave decently these days not because we’re afraid of the wrath of god or the afterlife, but rather because we’re concerned about how we will be perceived on Facebook and Twitter?