Lovely piece of analysis. But is it surprising that we would cease to believe in history? There's never before been a moment when mankind was suddenly face to face with the reality that thousands of other cultures exist just as vividly as our own. Only a century ago, other cultures were deeply exotic to most people in the West. Even within my lifetime, they seemed unreal. You read about them, but they occupied a space as unreal as peoples from ancient history.

I think the thousands of peoples and cultures of the world occupied the same territory in our minds that the Greek and Roman myths did.

The atheism of old was profoundly different, in that the old-school atheist only consciously disbelieved in his or her own God. Modern media and travel give us hundreds, even thousands, of other gods each with a vast population of fervent believers in our faces.

Modern atheists don't just disbelieve in their own god. They don't just disbelieve in all gods. They don't take seriously the idea of belief itself. You can see it in literature. Just fifty or sixty years ago, it was almost axiomatic that serious fiction was about moral struggles. Even serious popular fiction and cinema. Today it's utterly gone--we live in a world that is essentially without belief of any kind.