You sound like Jean Baudrillard on The End of History and Meaning.

Edit: I don't know of any word for the process you are describing, but I think if you follow up words that recur in Post-Modernist discourse about a similar idea of a diminishing frame of self-referentiality -- words like Hyperreality and Simulacrum -- you'll be heading in the right direction.

Or perhaps you just mean secularization.

Last edited by Hydra; 08/13/06 12:30 PM.