Some have argued that the more we know about ourselves and the world around us, the less we need religion. The following is one of the most articulate expressions of why religion becomes ever more relevant as humanity progresses (or just as relevant as it always has been). It restates the simple message of religion with a remarkable sensitivity to contemporary society. From The Dignity of Difference, (1^st  ed. p. 40) by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:

 ...no other system does what religion has traditionally undertaken to do, namely to offer an explanation of who we are and why, of our place in the universe and the meaning of events as they unfold around us. The great post-Enlightenment systems - science, economics, and political ideologies - have all retreated from their earlier roles as overarching philosophies. Science has become descriptive, economics transactional, and politics ever more managerial. They tell us what and how but not why. We turn to them to get what we want, but not to know what we ought to want. That is their power, but also, from another perspective, their weakness. Never before have we been faced with more choices, but never before have the great society-shaping institutions offered less guidance on why we should choose this way rather than that. The great metaphors of our time - the supermarket, cable and satellite television and the Internet - put before us a seemingly endless range of options, each offering the great deal, the best buy, the highest specification, the lowest price. But consumption is a poor candidate for salvation. The very happiness we were promised by buying these designer jeans, that watch or this car, is what the next product assures us we do not yet have until we have bought something else. A consumer society is kept going by an endless process of stimulating, satisfying, and re-stimulating desire. It is more like an addiction than a quest for fulfillment.

 - Rabbi Chaim Poupko
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