Beautifully said. It strikes me as incredibly arrogant and condescending that so-called rational, educated people today will gleefully throw out centuries (if not millennia) of knowledge because they (justifiably) take issues with some of it. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater comes to mind. I'm not particularly religious, but there have always been aspects of religion that I've admired and aspects that I've disliked.

Your local Crossfit gym and book club, I promise you, are not adequate replacements for traditional recurring weekly gatherings, where it's normal (and expected!) to share what's on your mind, what's troubling you, what you are grieving over, what you are celebrating, etc. I've found that the quality of discourse here is much higher than the standard, "Did you watch Succession last week?", surface-level discourse at many of these alleged replacements.

And then, like you mentioned, they embark on a decades-long quest, only to end up at more or less the place they would've ended up otherwise. Or they find themselves completely lost and wayward.

I don't have a prescription here, but complete rejection of something seems almost as dull and narrow-minded as total dogmatic acceptance of it.