No one will ever be able to take your spirituality from you, not even you, unless you go through some sort of trauma to make you question your beliefs. I have no interest in traumatizing people. I don't care what anyone believes. But the facts are the facts, and both religiosity and optimism boil down to nothing more than fantasy. You have to be committed to a fantasy in order for it to play out right, one might even say devoted. You have to buy into it. You must suspend your disbelief. Whether or not you are ever able to get that disbelief back depends on many factors: your income level, your education, your resourcefulness, your hunger for life, etc. The willingness to disbelieve, to not accept the simple answers to life's difficult questions, creates a desire to live life to its fullest in ways that religion simply cannot offer, that optimism only makes hollow promises about. Disbelief leaves room for creation and innovation. Within a spiritual context, everything is mapped out for you in advance. There is a reason for everything in religion, even horrible things like rape, torture and poverty. In the harsher versions of religion, people are born to suffer. Suffering is the retribution of almighty, powerful god and his wrath is just, regardless of human laws or customs. In newer versions of religion that wish to sidestep this obvious problem with spirituality, we choose to punish ourselves by denying to recognize the power of the almighty, kind of like how an abusive husband abandons his child so he can sew his royal oats in the garden of a strip club. In either version it becomes simple to just say well, god willed it so, and therefore, there is nothing we can do about it. Optimism compounds this effect, causing those who are irreligious to simply dismiss those in poverty because they believe that anyone who works hard enough can "make it", even though the number of well paying jobs has decreased incrementally since the 1990s, and even though barriers to careers like pandemics and chronic illness are beyond anyone's control. Optimism causes empathy to become unnecessary because anyone who is not optimistic is now making themselves poor. The circumstances are never bad under an optimistic worldview. You always just have to look on the bright side of every awful thing. This makes rich people feel better about themselves while forcing poor people into simply accepting their "fate" or "god's will". Allowing someone to starve to death becomes much easier for people when they are wrapped in this safety blanket of "destiny". Of course there are religious reform movements that seek to take more active roles in defeating poverty, but they have been slow to really take up the task of actually housing people or at least getting them jobs that will pay for long term housing. Religiosity in other wealthy nations around the world is relatively low, averaging at about a quarter of the nation, while in America over half of the country states that religion is very important to them. This is a dire problem because it will simply allow apathy about poverty to perpetuate itself. It will also lead to the depletion of American wealth, which will further embolden nations like Russia to make irrational aggressions that upset the world order, and create avoidable destruction.