The Man Who Saves You from Yourself (2013)

Multi level marketing, in particular a company called Nerium [1] is the closest thing I've seen to a cult lately.

[1]: http://www.nerium.com/

Another thing about secularism that bothers me (and I am not religious) is the strong negative association with birth rates. Look up the statistics. The more rational your worldview is the less you reproduce, to the point that most very secular nations are in demographic decline. Difficult investments in the future such as child rearing seem to be replaced by an evolutionary dead end Epicurean lifestyle.

I'm not arguing that everyone should join the Quiverfull movement, but it bothers me that fertility is inversely correlated to a rational worldview. Darwin is clearly on the side of fanaticism and superstition, in that if there is any genetic basis to these traits we are strongly selecting for them. Even if there is no genetic basis, beliefs propagate most strongly from parent to child so we are certainly culturally selecting for fanatical religious ideologies in the long term. A higher proportion of tomorrow's children will be the product of today's fundamentalists. I suspect this is why severe religious ideologies are historically so powerful. Those that didn't hold them left fewer descendants.

I see a connection there -- between deep pessimism and lack of fertility -- that points to some kind of psychological vacuum related to motivation and hope. Seems like when you take away myth, you take away teleological action. Actions belong to the realm of narrative -- storytelling -- not fact. This is as true in the secular realm as in the religious -- progress is a myth, not a fact. In the extreme it takes on a quasi-religious tone in the form of "the Singularity" and similar ideas. Even companies have myths, and startup founders often have to put on at least a little bit of a guru hat.

You also seem to take away the idea that one can stand up against overpowering adversity. It's certainly true that humanity faces difficult challenges, but those who have secular worldviews seem to easily default to hopelessness the minute their logical analysis turns up a probability of success that seems less than 50/50. Perhaps there's something adaptive about the craziness of faith... it causes us to actually try in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity.

Religion is a cultural construct to address certain issues like morality, cosmology, etc. It didn't fill any void, its just an outward expression of culture. Current culture is to handle these things inwardly and via some level of rational inquiry. We don't need a turn-key replacement. The only turn-key replacement for religion is more religion. Religion as a category and part of human experience needs to be eliminated. There's nothing to fill past that point.

This is like saying, "Now that we don't have phrenology, we need a new phrenology." No, we just accept we can't figure out how people work or what kind of people they are by feeling their skulls. We live with the ambiguity and use other tools to determine what people do via personality testing, statistics, psychology, etc which do not have the false certitude the pseudoscience of phrenology did the same way modern understanding of the world does not have the false certitude that religion delivers.

>Gordon Gecko was a fictional villain in 1987 cinema

Gecko and non-fictional villains of that age were all baby boomer monotheists, if not extremely faithful churchgoers, and often justified their negative aspects via faith. Or on a more everday front, see the Prosperity Gospel, The Secret, etc. George Bush still justifies a lot of his disastrous decisions in office via faith, including the invasion of Iraq which has killed at least 120k innocent civilians. Pardon me if I find the "but without religion we're lost morally" argument unconvincing. If anything, religion lets us act immorally without consequence.

What they need is therapy. Real therapy. But we live in a culture where we think some mystical shaman in Mumbai has the answers we seek, not some medical professional who studies the mind and how it works.

Many of the so-called 'swamis' of the world would be considered mentally ill in the Western world. I'm not being hyperbolic. Many of them are not well and the behavior is what you might see from an unbalanced homeless person wandering the streets of major U.S. cities.

And even in the West, insurance companies and the societal culture shun the idea of therapy. So while meditation and mental focus and all of those things can help people, they are tiny, usable sections of real therapy. But people take the easy way - the 'quick magic bullet' and clamor for the populist ideal of a mystical guru, whatever form that may be in.

People didn't have it 'figured out' hundreds or thousands of years ago. Hundreds or thousands of years ago people use to cut out other people's tongues or raid each other's homes to kidnap slaves. The human race has done some horrible things to each other over time and I don't subscribe to the idea that somehow we should be looking to those generations for advice on mental wellness.