People Underestimate the Resilience of World Religions

I was reading an article on the telegraph today (you can read it here: link) that speculated that Christianity may "die out" in England fairly soon. Some of the reader comments on the page really got me thinking though about how people are kind of overlooking the fact that major world religions never truly die.

Greek polytheism, for example, is not dead, it still survives in neo-pagan circles where the ancient mysteries are practiced by ethnic Greeks. Today is the June solstice, and some of these pagans are celebrating it right as I type this!

Not sure about the Romans, but I do know for a fact that great cultural and religious scholars like Joseph Campbell have written that the Roman Catholic Church IS a Roman church. That is to say, if a Roman in 200 AD walked into a Catholic Church, he would be in an environment that he would immediately identify as a Roman temple (just with gothic architecture instead of Greco). Roman religion certainly survives in interesting ways in our society, though. Western courthouses and government facilities ARE Roman temples. The statue up high on the Chicago Board of Trade building in the loop is Ceres, the Goddess of fertility. Justice and Minerva are on every flag and seal for the state of NY. Renaissance nobles would put portraits of Venus, cupid, etc. on their bedroom walls as a charm to improve their fertility (they would offset this blasphemy with massive donations to the church).

I can even think of surviving elements of the Egyptian church in our society... A lot of people probably already know this, but Christmas was also the birthday celebration of the Goddess Isis who had a strong cult following in Rome before Christianity came into play (her temples are in Pompeii), obelisks like the Washington Monument are symbols in the Egyptian mythos, the obelisk in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican was actually FROM ancient Egypt (it was stolen by the Romans and placed in the Circus Maximus, the Vatican then claimed it as the Vatican is built on the Vatican Hill which is where the Circus was...)

So I guess my point is: don't put too much money on "the death of Christianity" just yet...