> Alright, thousands of years ago, and even now (although a lot less prevalent), there were many relgions based on fable-like stories. Things like the sun was a bird who flew across the skies, and that men held locusts in caves and released them at certain times, and things of that sort. These things can be disproven. I think that this is one of the main reasons that Christianity, Islam, and the like have replaced them in many parts of the world. While these earlier religions could be proven to be wrong, Judaism and such cannot be.

Also, at least in the case of Christianity, many local religions have *become* Christianity more than been replaced by them. The Koreans are the first example to come to mind--missionaries found the Koreans' beliefs in Hannanim to be entirely compatible with Christianity, so they tailored the specific revelation to the general revelation, and translated Jesus as the Son of Hannanim. The Inca believed in Viracocha, a vague trinity, but sadly for them the conquistadores arrived before the missionaries. There were dozens of remote tribes in Burma whose names I don't recall whose religious beliefs were nothing more than: "a white man will come with a white book and tell you the truth." William Schmidt catalogued the Sky God phenomenon in his various mammoth tomes, if you are desperate to read more. Don Richardson wrote a smaller, friendlier book about the 'Melchizedek factor' called "Eternity in Their Hearts."

But, in general, one has to agree that the religious makeup of the world is constantly changing.