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Notes -
I've seen variations on the secularizer pitch before. Many arguments for the value of some religion but none have imo satisfactorily put to bed Paul's challenge, or the question of what would have happened to Christianity if he'd believed as they did:
Religion requires some sacrifice and discipline to have staying power. Here we have perhaps the most successful evangelist in human history saying as much. Is he just wrong?
If this is true for evangelists, it's still true today for religion on a much smaller scale. You can say that Christianity has succeeded enough that you can just coast on the existing credibility and hardly worry about ending up in the Coliseum but this is self-evidently insufficient (identification and religiosity has been dropping for a while) but, even were it so, where does that leave new versions of "faith"?
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