How Will Religion Evolve? - TierneyLab Blog - NYTimes.com
If you want to read something really amusing, read this essay in which people who don't believe in God speculate on the future of religion:

Does religion have a future? Who looks more like an evolutionary dead end: the religious American or the agnostic European? Or will both give way to some sort of compromise — people bound by new institutions that provide the social benefits of religion without belief in a traditional deity?

It's not that I disagree with their social utilitarian perspective - the idea that religions serve a public good - I think that Christianity and indeed other religions that promote positive values like love, forgiveness, charity, and compassion do serve a public good and it's one of the primary reasons that a historically Christian but pluralist country like the U.S. has no problem welcoming and tolerating such religions. We should be very careful though about putting out the welcome mat for religions that are corrosive to the values of civilization, religions that are violent and anti-life, those should not even be in the same category of socially stabilizing religions.

No, it's not that I disagree with their premise at all, I'm very confident in the power of Christianity to grow with the culture, to use all forms of new technology to preach the gospel of salvation and to address the deep seated questions of the soul in the way that only Christianity can, but I can only laugh at their ridiculous conclusion that the end point of the process of religious "evolution" is actually a devolution to the kind of plant and animal worship of our pagan ancestors. Fortunately, God is patient and understands that sometimes children miss the point that we should worship the Creator and not the creation. Perhaps the path toward spiritual maturity will lead John Tierney and Nicholas Wade from worshiping Greenery to worshiping God.