On a good day, when I’m feeling optimistic about future society – which isn’t very often, if you follow this blog – I can foresee the rapid shedding of religious beliefs in America perhaps two or three generations from now.

As it becomes less and less stigmatizing to proclaim one’s nonbelief, closet atheists will begin to “come out” in growing numbers. At some inflection point, it will become mainstream or, at least, no longer socially acceptable to vilify someone over their atheist or agnostic beliefs. Eventually, it will no longer be political suicide to be openly unreligious.

Influenced by advances in science and technology, more and more parents will become less rigid about brainwashing their offspring with outdated, dogmatic silliness. That next generation will have the chance to become the first nonreligious majority in American society. After that, religion will peel away like an onion and only the fundamentalists and die-hards will remain, relegated to the margins of society like cults or the Amish are today.

It was much the same process with slavery and its acceptance. And we are now on the tail-end of the process with homosexuality.

After all, the power of religious groups lies not in their ideas but in their numbers. And as those numbers decline, so too shall their power. Glory be the day.

Here’s a rough-cut summary: tens of thousands of workers, predominantly in third-world nations, sacrifice their health digging up hillsides and stream beds in order to find a few shiny objects. The shiny objects are then shipped across the globe so that other people can place them on their bodies and feel more important than they are.

Many of the diggers are forced to work against their will, and some of them die in the process. Genuine twenty-first century slavery.

Meanwhile, first-world consumers are marketing-conditioned to spend an obscene amount of money to purchase a useless, inert bauble. And they feel happy doing it!

But here’s the pièce de résistance: more than thirty years ago, a process to synthetically manufacture a diamond substitute was developed. Cubic zirconia, at a fraction of the cost and without the human suffering, is indistinguishable from the real thing to anyone not carrying a jeweler’s loupe with them.

Yet vanity knows no bounds. Consumers want only “the real thing.”

If the human race is ever placed on trial in some cosmic court, I am testifying on behalf of the prosecution.