This is fascinating, because from my perspective, it seems like it would be (and is) the opposite: Religion has never been more essential today https://twitter.com/ZacharyBraiterm/status/1249847416217636866">https://twitter.com/ZacharyBr...

First, pandemics force us to contend with that thing we tend to avoid contending with: death. As a society, we& #39;re not designed to confront the prospect of death and its implications. And it& #39;s understandable that we wouldn& #39;t want to, or be willing, confront it unless we had to

And, this, at least for Americans is an unusual pandemic. If death is around us—and everyone I know knows someone whose health has suffered, or worse—then what choice do we have but to think about our own readiness to face, if we had to, what comes (or doesn& #39;t come) after?

As for science, science can answer factual questions about fighting a virus (and even then not entirely successfully), but it can& #39;t answer "ultimate" questions. @sullydish captures this quite well in the passage below

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/andrew-sullivan-americas-new-religions.html">https://nymag.com/intellige...

Natural disasters are difficult to make sense of outside of some broader philosophical, theological context. Without that, they become merely random, and if there& #39;s anything we need, for better or worse, it& #39;s to situate suffering in a framework that makes it less painful