Decline of religion

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I think it is perhaps instructive to recall the Roman Empire is thought to have also seen a long decline of established traditional and state sponsored religions from the 1st to the 3rd century, coincident with a rise in large number of esoteric cults of various provenance.   It is probably this fractured cultscape that facilitated a boastfully anti-rational, Credo quia absurdum, cult called Christianity to opportunistically and virulently reassert the primacy of a single, much more smothering, religion.   So decline in religion does not necessarily betoken a decline in stupidity and gullibility, it may just endow more cunningly opportunistic cults with a more open field.

This could actually be formulated as a law: The strength of the largest traditional religion in a given society varies as the inverse square of the number of fringe religions in that society.

Boru