The new religions are unlikely to emerge from the caves of Afghanistan or from the madrasas of the Middle East. Rather, they will emerge from research laboratories. Just as socialism took over the world by promising salvation through steam and electricity, so in the coming decades new techno-religions may conquer the world by promising salvation through algorithms and genes.
This outlook is highly dubious - the religions of both the axial age and those of secularism, the past 2,000 years of strife, were born out of the disenfranchised and losers, they prevailed against the powers that be and their outlook.
Why should the new faiths of the 21st century not do the same, as a counter to the author's thesis? How do we know that the new faiths won't be successful because of their opposition to trans-humanism, big data, techno-faiths?
The past 2,000 years of cultural and technological revolutions have done nothing to fundamentally erode the major faiths - there's no evidence of such - it's only in the past few decades that our faith communities are notably shrinking. Outside of a couple notable exceptions, the phased rollout of the Industrial Revolution, and all the philosophy that came with it, simply did not erode our participation in traditional faith systems - so why now?
We are killing god, tearing apart the family, but the blame doesn't appear to fall on tech, or as a cultural response to such - so what's causing the disintegration? The newest communications tools can just as easily be leveraged to strengthen faith.
