[simonh]

What makes you believe secularism leads to reduced social cohesion? Surely it eliminates a source of friction between religious groups?

[antepodius]

Suppose every member of a small town went to church every sunday. Everyone interacts with everyone else in the area, for a bit.

You don't get that in secular society.

[oblio]

There's many ways to socialize and few of them are religious. I'm willing to bet we had parties way before we invented religion ;)

[antepodius]

Harvest festivals were religious- or at least tied up in religion.

You can't just take a core element of a heavy intertwined, complex system without collateral damage. It's like deleting a file in a spaghetti codebase. Half the codebase interacts with any given file in some way or other.