http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutgrownSuchSillySuperstitions

Mark Twain, Notebook , Notebook "Christianity will doubtless still survive in the earth ten centuries hence — stuffed and in a museum."

One way to show how "advanced" a society is in Science Fiction or certain kinds of fantasy works is to show that it's given up religion. A society may consider religion backward and primitive, consider it a dangerous tool for controlling the populace, or have discovered it was a Scam Religion. Such societies are often contrasted in the same work with more "primitive" societies which are still religious to some degree; these are usually portrayed as harmless fanatics, often of a Fantasy Counterpart Religion.

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This is a difficult trope to write about well, and many who use it fall into Author Tracts. Part of this is because of the demographics of science fiction writers; especially in the "Golden Age" of sci-fi, empiricists and secular humanists were particularly attracted to the genre. A common variation of this trope sees the "advanced" society show the "primitive" society the error of its ways and prove that The Presents Were Never from Santa. Since then, sci-fi has become more mainstream (and the militant atheist a more annoying character), so this trope's usage has become more nuanced. Nowadays, you might find a society that discovered it was worshipping advanced technology or Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. You might even see the inverse, where an atheistic society discovers for whatever reason that it kind of needed silly superstition to function, or even the God or gods they worshiped being proven true.

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It's very often paired with an Alternative Calendar, since the one we use today is strongly influenced by Christianity. Societies will then choose a new "year zero", which will often coincide with a major scientific breakthrough — the moon landing is among the most popular.

Compare What We Now Know to Be True and No Such Thing as Space Jesus. Contrast Gravity Is Only a Theory, Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane, and Science Is Wrong. See also Religion Rant Song. The individual-scale version of this trope is the Hollywood Atheist.

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Examples:

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In Legend of Galactic Heroes, religious beliefs are close to non-existent, which is explained as a result of people becoming disillusioned over religion after a nuclear holocaust mentioned in the backstory. The only organised religion present in the series, the Terraist Church, turns out to be a Path of Inspiration which aims to revive Earth's past glory through subversive actions such as assassinating key figures of the galaxy.

Religion is rarely mentioned in the classic Universal Century timeline of Gundam. In fact, the UC calendar was originally established in order to invoke this trope and usher in an utopian age for mankind. There is still room from any number of fringe cults, but these mostly have political ulterior motives, such as the Zanscare Empire in Mobile Suit Victory Gundam or the myriad manifestations of Zeon ideology. Defied in 0096 Unicorn: The reason why spacenoids had such a fervent worship of Christianity, which transitioned to a blind obedience to Zeon philosophy, was because they had nothing else to live for or hope with in the cold, resource-scare void of space. As Marida explains, the Universal Century was anything but atheist for the poverty-stricken colonists.

In Code Geass, Lloyd lightly teases Suzaku about how the Japanese still believes in such superstitions.

A modern-day variant in Your Name; according to Another Side: Earthbound, one of the key reasons for Toshiki running for mayor was to try and invoke this in Itomori and break the hold that the Miyamizu and their Shinto beliefs have traditionally held over the town after Futaba's death shattered his faith in the gods. He realises almost too late that there is indeed truth in the legends he sneered at.

Averted and even inverted in the manga Alice in Borderland. At one point, some of the characters wonder how they ended up in a strange world that requires them to play deadly games to keep living. One character, a forensic scientist, muses about different supernatural and spiritual reasons they might be there. Another character asks how a scientist could still believe such things, and she replies that science has only been able to take humanity so far, and at some point there are big things that even science hasn't yet been able to tell them.

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In Warren Ellis' Supergod, faith is stated to be a biological flaw in human neurology that enables group behavior without the enlightened self-interest that should preclude it — a "narcotic response" to the concept of a higher power. This means most people will follow leaders based on their ability to evoke that response rather than their ability to encourage survival. It also means that most people would be quite willing to surrender their free will to powerful forces that don't even see them as bacteria. You can guess how that turns out.

Zig-zagged in Jannah Station, where Earthlings are the only large group of remaining atheists. Almost everyone off-planet is religious to some extent or other.

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Utterly inverted and even defied in Infinity. Not only is religion still around in the future, but it might be more important to humanity than it is now. Of course, the religions of Earth have greatly reformed. Haqqislam is following a version of Islam that embraces progress with numerous Christian and Jewish minorities living in its realms. Jerusalem is still a holy site for the Abrahamic faiths. The nation Panoceania is influenced by the Vatican and can field advanced futuristic crusaders. Yu Jing had the Chinese Communist Party decided to embrace forms of East Asian spirituality in its expansion. Even minor religions like the Druze are still around and their forces are still influenced by their religion.

In CthulhuTech, Christianity and Islam are gone; it's not really expounded upon, they're just gone. Presumably, the very real and somewhat provable existence of the old ones made everyone less interested in religions that have a very specific world view that excludes them.

Warhammer 40,000 mostly averts this, with Church Militants and Religions Of Evil popping up everywhere, but it still has a few examples: The Tau seem to exhibit divine worship of their Ethereals, but that is more obeisance to their leaders than religion; they otherwise have no belief in anything "magical" or "supernatural", including the very real daemons and other things that inhabit the warp. As a race with no psychers and whose souls barely touch the warp, in practical terms thinking of daemons as just another hostile alien race is true enough for practical purposes. They are by far the most socially and technologically progressive faction in the setting, which admittedly isn't saying much. The Eldar believe in the existence of their gods and invoke the power of one (Khaine) on a semi-regular basis, but they don't worship them; they mostly just use them for Oh My Gods!. This is because all but three of their gods were eaten by a Chaos god, and there is no real point to much of their religion anymore (except for Cegorach the Laughing God, but only the Harlequins worship him). The Immortal God-Emperor of Mankind tried to invoke this, creating a society of Flat Earth Atheists because he thought it would starve the Chaos gods (which was not only unlikely to work, as the Chaos Gods don't need worship, but backfired because while people were channeling their emotions to those religions, they were denying them to the Chaos Gods). Being 40K, it failed miserably and made everything worse. Ironically, he himself ended up being worshiped by the humans of the Imperium. Amusingly enough, when he destroyed the last vaguely-Abrahamic church on Terra (in the short story The Last Church) the priest explained exactly why this would happen.

In Eclipse Phase, many religions didn't survive the Fall and the exodus via Brain Uploading from earth, but new faiths arose to fill in the gaps. The most common is Neo-Buddhism, Buddhism combined with Transhumanism, where uploading is seen as a form of reincarnation and the emphasis is on lessening suffering rather than escaping it. Oddly, Islam was able to adapt to uploading, but the other Abrahamic faiths largely couldn't. The Catholic church is also still influential in the Jovian Junta, with its large population that managed to escape Earth in their original bodies.

Zig-zagged in New World of Darkness, where becoming one of the supernatural races may or may not result in a weakening of old religious beliefs.

Actively averted in BattleTech. All five Successor States have active and vibrant religions and religious traditions. Alongside Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and the other mainstream real life faiths, many, many new in-universe faiths have cropped up from the benign note such as the Unfinished Book Movement in the Federated Suns, which aims to compile all the Inner Sphere's holy texts into a massive sacred encyclopedia to the esoteric note the technophobic Exituri of Shiloh . Notable amongst the religions in the setting is ComStar which was a constructed religion intent originally on preserving the technological knowledge of the Inner Sphere from the coming Succession Wars. Unfortunately, the faith's founders realized and feared, but were powerless to stop the eventual corruption of that ideal into the Word of Blake. All in all, religion is presented fairly even-handedly for a science fiction setting note YMMV, though, on the accuracy of what's presented, with writers occasionally making well-intentioned Critical Research Failures such as having a Catholic priest say "By the power vested in me by the Curia and His Holiness, I excommunicate you and condemn you to eternal Purgatory." Zig-zagged where it comes to the Clans. They are officially atheistic, though even that is not an absolute. All of the Clans have some sort of reverence, sometimes bordering on worship, for Alexander and Nicholas Kerensky, and Clans Coyote, Cloud Cobra, Goliath Scorpion and Nova Cat all have some sort of spirituality aspect to their practices. Further, the Clans, even the more hard-edged atheist ones, are not shown to be morally or intellectually superior to the Inner Sphere.

to the esoteric . Notable amongst the religions in the setting is ComStar which was a constructed religion intent originally on preserving the technological knowledge of the Inner Sphere from the coming Succession Wars. Unfortunately, the faith's founders realized and feared, but were powerless to stop the eventual corruption of that ideal into the Word of Blake. All in all, religion is presented fairly even-handedly for a science fiction setting

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