Atheism can become a stable cultural equilibrium comparable to universal literacy

Evidence

I think they are right that in human brains, religion has a head start over atheism and science. But once we broaden our scope to accommodate the many paths to disbelief, and appreciate that these paths can be mutually energizing, we can see that, under the right conditions, atheism can flourish and become a viable cultural equilibrium. Consider literacy as an analogy. Illiteracy is more intuitive and easier to arise than literacy, and humanity has been illiterate for 99.99 percent of its evolutionary history. But while literacy is initially hard to get off the ground, once all the conditions for literacy are there, it can be a culturally stable pattern, and indeed, we now have, for the first time in human history, entire populations with universal literacy. Similarly, we might be on the verge of a new phenomenon—cooperative societies without God. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 628

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Challenges the central ‘Big Gods’ thesis much of this book rests on: if secular societies reach stable cooperation without gods, the omniscient-god enforcement mechanism may be historically contingent rather than the permanent foundation of large-scale cooperation — the very tension the reader is probing through Silence.
• XREF: Bears directly on Baumard/Norenzayan material the reader is bridging; the literacy analogy offers a model for how a destabilized religious equilibrium (fumi-e era) could flip to a new equilibrium.
• SEED: Essay angle: what conditions flip a ‘religious has head start’ society into durable secularity, and can coercion (as in Tokugawa Japan) produce the same end state as existential security (as in Scandinavia)?