Ok, so I am not a student of literature or religion, but I believe there are fundamental human aesthetic principles that non-materialist religious and wholistic ideas satisfy in our psychology. They try to explain things in large concepts that humans have evolved to easily grasp rather than the minutiae and logical puzzles of reality. If materialists want these memes to be given up, they will need to create equally compelling human metaphor, which is a tall order if we want everything to convey reality correctly. Compelling metaphor is frequently incorrect. My atheist-jewish husband loves to talk about the beauty of scripture and parables in the Christian bible and stands firm against my insistence that any number of novels are both better written and provide better moral guidance. I personally have a disgust reaction whenever he points out a flowery passage about morality and humanity that doesn't make any actual sense. HOW CAN YOU BE TAKEN IN BY THAT? But unlike practicing religious people, he doesn't 'believe' any of it, he's just attracted to it aesthetically, as an idea, as a beautiful outgrowth of the human spirit. Basically, it presses all the right psychological buttons. This is not to say that materialists cannot produce equally compelling metaphors, but it may be a very difficult task, and the spiritualists have a good, I don't know, 10,000 years on us in honing in on what appeals to our primitive psychology.