A lot of religion's power lies in the laity's fear of what happens to us when we die. The "flaw" in atheism (they say) is that it cannot explain the "afterlife". Well, here ya go: an atheists explanation of death:

What I have learned is this: The brain works on an electric charge that is roughly equal to your average car battery. This electricity jumps from neuron to neuron, interacting with other bits of electricity to create a sense of self. In order to leap across the space between neurons the electricity needs stuff like Adrenaline, Dopamine, Serotonin etc.. Using one of these, a thought (the electric charge) crosses the gap between neurons and thus keeps us functioning. As long as this process keeps happening, we are alive.

We know that Church attendance is dropping in North America and Europe - especially in traditional religions like the Methodists, Catholics and Anglicans.  Why is this?  One of the reasons is that people are migrating to emotional, fundamentalist religions like the Baptists and Pentecostals.  Others are leaving altogether - maybe not giving up on the idea of a god, but giving up on organized religions.  Because humans have a built in need to believe, some will turn to mysticism or some vague belief in a "higher power".  Others will say (and think) that they still belong to the Church of their childhood but  rarely actually go to Church.

This has not gone unnoticed in the Methodist Church in the U.S.  where, after a steady decline for decades, there are now  7.8 million members.  Also, the average age of clergy and parishioners has been steadily rising indicating "a creeping crisis of relevancy" amongst young people.   And like many Churches, they are running into financial difficulties.

However,  rather than die quietly, the Methodist leaders in the U.S. decided to be scientific(!) and pay big bucks for a survey. Can you guess what the survey said?  As I would have expected, there is no magic bullet, no single action to take.  But there is a list of four things that "fuel vitality".

Being put to death by stoning must be one of the most cruel punishments imaginable. One would think it would be reserved for some of the most horrendous crimes imaginable. It isn't. At least, not in Iran, where some 200 people are on death row in Tabriz Prison, 35 of them women awaiting their turn to be stoned for crimes that seem by Western standards to be almost frivolous-among them, the crime of being raped. In Iran and other Muslim countries where it's practiced, it's mostly meted out girls and women.

The practice appears to have been adopted by Middle Eastern people pre-biblical times and has continued up to the present day. Basically, it consists of the victim being buried vertically in the ground up to the waist in the case of a man, and up to her neck in the case of a woman. Women may be covered by or wrapped in a white sheet. A crowd of men then forms a circle around the victim and hurls fist-size or larger rocks until the authorities decide the victim is dead.