While I don't disagree with your challenge to Shweder's too easy summary of some standard 'story of religion' or his conclusion about atheists, I also think he makes an interesting point, that the recognition of the hollowness of that Enlightenment story of progress has finally begun to seep deeply into everyday culture.

That 'story' is everywhere: it provides the foundation for every major institutional set of practices in the west and it has required various forms of violence to install 'secular, democratic, pluralism' for the past two centuries, including but not limited to imperialism, the slave trade, patriarchal domination and genocide. Every 'roadmap to peace' and 'universal declaration of human rights' is based on that narrative, however pretty these sound. That the pretensions of that narrative have been exposed to the point that outright manipulation of opinion and/or coercion must be frequently employed in order to keep people believing in it (the Bush administration's manipulation of the press is only one example) is part of the coming to consciousness of that awareness Shweder speaks of, I'd suggest.

One cannot step outside the story anymore than an actor can step from the screen. We exist by use of a story of reality, woven from symbols that arise from the very same story. But that doesn't make sense, oh yeah.

So maybe what's happening today is people are finally realizing that it's *narrative* that's become empty; that the content of the narrative -- comforting stories about eternal life, uplifting stories about universal freedom -- doesn't matter so much as narrative's ability to let us feel that there's order in the world. But of course there IS no order to the world, only our attempts to provide some kind of control. When we believe that the attempt is 'real' then we lead ourselves into incredible tangles, willing to kill in order to prove the rightness of our particular narrative because it's through narrative that we find our places in the world, establish meaning in our lives...

But narrative is, of course, a constructed thing. Accidents will happen. Endings go awry. Randomness and chance are partly the reason, but (here's the upbeat part of this response) people also have a nearly infinite number of choices they can make in any given situation. As Thomas Pynchon reminds us, it's the crazy unpredictability of human response to the chaos that makes life interesting... we're on the road to nowhere, not utopia -- Sisyphus's absurd joy.