I’m out of my league here, but I don’t see what anyone could gain from that. Religion is a belief system that plenty of people seem to be able to adapt to present times.
This scientific mysticism seems like a euphenism for secularism…
Man, I can’t even conceive of what you mean by placing those two words together. There’s no way they can harmonize.
Not at all. Secularism is one of those words tossed about in the media with as much venom as people can possibly muster 'cause using it in a half-correct way would require evaluating actual ideas, which must be a nasty business. As I understand it, secularism is not an ideology that supports the eradication of religion in any way, but seeks to recognize an appropriate division between the public system of a nation’s laws and the private exercise of religion by its citizens. “Separation of church and state,” in brief.
Funny, because its essentially what has been the primary motivation for science from Aristotle to Ptolemy to Copernicus to Newton to Einstein.
As I understand it, secularism is not an ideology that supports the eradication of religion in any way, but seeks to recognize an appropriate division between the public system of a nation’s laws and the private exercise of religion by its citizens. “Separation of church and state,” in brief.
True religion and secularism probably can’t coexist, and this is why so many of our contemporary religionists so stridently oppose it.
“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”. Talking about Christianity, I don’t see how the state and religion being intertwined makes people accept religion on their own rather than lead them to nominal faith a la the pharisee and the tax collector parable. I question more the interpretation of your contemporary (American?) religionists, than the idea of secularism and religion not being able to coexist. Of course, in such a setting religion will be a matter of choice (as it was intended to be).
I don’t know, Sil, I don’t really think we are worse off than people in past ages. We have more possibilities and are freer socially, even if the way we treated the fall of nazism and communism with their respective baggage was at best intellectually dishonest. I get the charm of waiting for an apocalypse (which I fear is more likely to be economic in nature) and, say, I’m pissed at the newspaper for using quotation marks around words they don’t use literally (!) but I don’t think there’s a change in the human condition. Rather, new media and lifestyles have impacted the way people think and -hopefully, still- read. It’s no trivial matter, for sure, but change is the norm in life and we’ll roll with what we’ve got.
Poor Byzantines, lacking diplomacy 
When religion is intertwined with a state, like the Papal state or, vice versa, like the old Patriarchy of Constantinople or Jerusalem, you don’t judge them solely by Christian motives because that isn’t their only function. Which, incidentally, brings us back to my former point that secularism is beneficial to religion.
The problem might be that you’re visualizing religion at its purest, soul-fulfilling state whereas you take science in our society as exactly what it is - science in society, and thus imperfect, subject to incorrect interpretations, and glossed over with mysticism by the ignorant and those who champion parts of it for their own personal purposes. If you would take religion within the context of society, I don’t see how fanaticism, zealotry, and blind devotion is any better than the “nihilistic materialism” you so abhor, or how pure scientific observation and derivations can be seen as clouded by any amount of mysticism.
I wish I believed in God. I’d like to go to heaven if there is one. I don’t wanna die!
Is that normal?