text: Your insight about wealth, and the security it provides is good, but it misses one closely related topic: health.
  
  With the advent of improvoed sanitation and medical treatment, the imminent prospect of death has been pushed to the distance.  We are not faced with a situation like my maternal grandmother, whose first two children and their father died of infectious diseases in the course of three years.  She remarried, remained devout, and cared deeply for her second husband and their only child, my mother.  This pattern of large families and early deaths is not just anecdotal, it is supported by the statistics and other historical examples.
  
  Of course, people still get sick, and some of us die early, but it is sufficiently rare that we now consider the death of a child to be something out of the order of things.  We would do well to consider the impact that medicine has had in reducing the insecurity of life and the need for the solace of faith for most of our generation..