"They have lost faith and trust in politics," he begins at a speech delivered to hedge fund managers. "They have lost faith and trust in the political powers in Washington."

The loss of faith and trust, he says, extends beyond the stock marketto societal institutions all the way to religion.

But on this day, speaking to a few thousand fund pros at the Skybridge Alternatives, or SALT, conference in Las Vegas, the chief strategist at Morgan StanleySmith Barney is on hand not to talk about theology but about the religion of investing.

It is, he says to a hushed crowd that knows exactly what he's talking about, a faith that is losing converts every day.

"Your mission on this earth," Darst says in trying to simplify the equation, "is to determine price versus value."

Or at least that's the way it should be. Nowadays a financial adviser also has to convince investors that the stock market waters are calm and it's safe to go swimming again.

But the market is in a crisis marked more than anything by sheer apathy.

Even as major indexes like the Dow , Standard & Poor's 500 and Nasdaq reach post-financial crisis highs, they are doing so without the participation of mom-and-pop investors, who have been unabated in pulling money out of the stock market and putting it into low-yielding bonds, which have long been perceived as a safer and decidedly less glamorous choice.

At some point the question, then, has to be asked: Is the stock market dead?

Sure, dead may be an alarmist's exaggeration, but it's difficult not to worry about the health of an entity that has seen the life sapped of it since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, a trend that has accelerated since the vaunted Flash Crash of two years ago.