Success Quote by John Templeton

A financier’s skepticism has a particular flavor: it doesn’t just doubt belief, it audits it. When John Templeton says religions are “becoming obsolete,” he borrows the vocabulary of markets and technology - the language of products that fail to update, institutions that lose competitive advantage. “Clinging” does extra work here: it paints faith not as a living tradition but as a hand locked around dead weight, an emotional refusal to adapt. The jab isn’t only at doctrine; it’s at governance, hierarchy, and inherited authority that, in his view, can’t keep pace with modern knowledge.

Templeton’s intent reads less like atheism than modernization pressure. He’s not declaring the end of spirituality; he’s forecasting the decline of organized religion as a credible manager of meaning in an era of science, pluralism, and global interchange. The subtext is utilitarian: if a belief system can’t demonstrate practical, ethical, or intellectual returns, why should society keep investing in it? Coming from a businessman famous for global investing and later associated with philanthropy around “progress” in spiritual understanding, it’s also a provocation aimed at reformers inside religion: evolve or be outcompeted by newer ways of making sense of suffering, morality, and community.

Context matters: Templeton lived through two world wars, the Cold War, decolonization, and the rise of mass media - decades when old certainties were stress-tested in public. His phrasing channels late-20th-century confidence that history moves forward, and institutions that don’t modernize get left behind. The risk, of course, is that he underestimates religion’s resilience precisely because it isn’t only an “ancient concept” but a social technology for belonging.