Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 2

Daniel Dennett, The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion

I’m so optimistic that I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion. I think that in about twenty-five years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe it does today. Of course many people–perhaps a majority of people in the world–will still cling to their religion with the sort of passion that can fuel violence and other intolerant and reprehensible behavior. But the rest of the world will see this behavior for what it is, and learn to work around it until it subsides, as it surely will. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we will need every morsel of this reasonable attitude to deal with such complex global problems as climate change, fresh water, and economic inequality in an effective way. It will be touch and go, and in my pessimistic moods I think Sir Martin Rees may be right: some disaffected religious (or political) group may unleash a biological or nuclear catastrophe that forecloses all our good efforts. But I do think we have the resources and the knowledge to forestall such calamities if we are vigilant.

Recall that only fifty years ago smoking was a high status activity and it was considered rude to ask somebody to stop smoking in one’s presence. Today we’ve learned that we shouldn’t make the mistake of trying to prohibit smoking altogether, and so we still have plenty of cigarettes and smokers, but we have certainly contained the noxious aspects within quite acceptable boundaries. Smoking is no longer cool, and the day will come when religion is, first, a take-it-or-leave-it choice, and later: no longer cool–except in its socially valuable forms, where it will be one type of allegiance among many. Will those descendant institutions still be religions? Or will religions have thereby morphed themselves into extinction? It all depends on what you think the key or defining elements of religion are. Are dinosaurs extinct, or do their lineages live on as birds?

Tajik Muslims praying, Alexei Vladykin, AP

John Gray, The atheist delusion, guardian.co.uk, March 15, 2008

‘Opposition to religion occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally,’ wrote Martin Amis recently. Over the past few years, leading writers and thinkers have published bestselling tracts against God. John Gray on why the ’secular fundamentalists’ have got it all wrong

Saturday March 15, 2008
The Guardian

An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world’s worst evils. As a result, there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism. A few years ago, it was difficult to persuade commercial publishers even to think of bringing out books on religion. Today, tracts against religion can be enormous money-spinners, with Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great selling in the hundreds of thousands. For the first time in generations, scientists and philosophers, high-profile novelists and journalists are debating whether religion has a future. The intellectual traffic is not all one-way. There have been counterblasts for believers, such as The Dawkins Delusion? by the British theologian Alister McGrath and The Secular Age by the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. On the whole, however, the anti-God squad has dominated the sales charts, and it is worth asking why.

The abrupt shift in the perception of religion is only partly explained by terrorism. The 9/11 hijackers saw themselves as martyrs in a religious tradition, and western opinion has accepted their self-image. And there are some who view the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a danger comparable with the worst that were faced by liberal societies in the 20th century.

For Dawkins and Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Martin Amis, Michel Onfray, Philip Pullman and others, religion in general is a poison that has fuelled violence and oppression throughout history, right up to the present day. The urgency with which they produce their anti-religious polemics suggests that a change has occurred as significant as the rise of terrorism: the tide of secularisation has turned. These writers come from a generation schooled to think of religion as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development, which is bound to dwindle away as knowledge continues to increase. In the 19th century, when the scientific and industrial revolutions were changing society very quickly, this may not have been an unreasonable assumption. Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest may still believe that, over the long run, the advance of science will drive religion to the margins of human life, but this is now an article of faith rather than a theory based on evidence.

Manufacturing belief, Salon, May 15, 2007

Wolpert is an eminent developmental biologist at University College London. Like fellow British scientist Richard Dawkins, he’s an outspoken atheist with a knack for saying outrageous things. Unlike Dawkins, Wolpert has no desire to abolish religion. In fact, he thinks religious belief can provide great comfort and points to medical studies showing that the faithful tend to suffer less stress and anxiety than nonbelievers. In Wolpert’s view, religion has given believers an evolutionary advantage, even though it’s based on a grand illusion….

Are you saying our brains are hard-wired for belief?
Our brains are absolutely hard-wired for causal belief. And I think they’re a bit soft-wired for religious and mystical belief. Those people who had religious beliefs did better than those who did not, and they were selected for.

Why did they do better?
They were less anxious. They also had someone to pray to. In general, religious people are somewhat healthier than people who don’t have religious beliefs.

Haven’t studies shown that religious believers tend to be more optimistic, and that they’re less prone to strokes and high blood pressure?
Yes, exactly. Therefore, evolution will select them.

So religion gives us a sense of purpose and meaning, even though in your view it’s totally an illusion.
Yes, many people would find it very hard to live without religion. But there is no meaning, I regret to tell you. [Laughs] We don’t understand where the universe came from….

If you look into your crystal ball, do you think we will always have religion? Or will reason win out at some point?

I believe we will always have religion. Churchgoing has declined in England, but the number of people who believe in God is still quite high. And in America, it’s very high. And you just have to look at the Muslim world. It’s very strong there. I’d be very surprised if it disappeared.

So the project of Richard Dawkins — basically, to try to turn us all into atheists — is just a pipe dream?

I believe it to be a pipe dream. The idea that you could persuade people not to be religious is in my view a hopeless aim. It comes from people’s personal experience, rather than logical arguments.

Edge: MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION: A Talk With Jonathan Haidt

…surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people. Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too. If you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering, then I think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious people actually live and ask what they are doing right.

Don’t dismiss religion on the basis of a superficial reading of the Bible and the newspaper. Might religious communities offer us insights into human flourishing? Can they teach us lessons that would improve wellbeing even in a primarily contractualist society….

…surveys have shown for decades that religious practice is a strong predictor of charitable giving. Arthur Brooks recently analyzed these data (in Who Really Cares) and concluded that the enormous generosity of religious believers is not just recycled to religious charities.Religious believers give more money than secular folk to secular charities, and to their neighbors. They give more of their time, too, and of their blood. Even if you excuse secular liberals from charity because they vote for government welfare programs, it is awfully hard to explain why secular liberals give so little blood. The bottom line, Brooks concludes, is that all forms of giving go together, and all are greatly increased by religious participation and slightly increased by conservative ideology (after controlling for religiosity).

These data are complex and perhaps they can be spun the other way, but at the moment it appears that Dennett is wrong in his reading of the literature. Atheists may have many other virtues, but on one of the least controversial and most objective measures of moral behavior—giving time, money, and blood to help strangers in need—religious people appear to be morally superior to secular folk.

My conclusion is not that secular liberal societies should be made more religious and conservative in a utilitarian bid to increase happiness, charity, longevity, and social capital. Too many valuable rights would be at risk, too many people would be excluded, and societies are so complex that it’s impossible to do such social engineering and get only what you bargained for. My point is just that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

But because of the four principles of moral psychology it is extremely difficult for people, even scientists, to find that wisdom once hostilities erupt. A militant form of atheism that claims the backing of science and encourages “brights” to take up arms may perhaps advance atheism. But it may also backfire, polluting the scientific study of religion with moralistic dogma and damaging the prestige of science in the process.

‘The God Delusion’ - The New York Review of Books, March 1, 2007

By Daniel C. Dennett, Reply by H. Allen Orr

In response to A Mission to Convert (January 11, 2007)

To the Editors:

H. Allen Orr, in “A Mission to Convert” [NYR, January 11], his review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and other recent books on science and religion, says that Dawkins is an amateur, not professional, atheist, and has failed to come to grips with “religious thought” with its “meticulous reasoning” in any serious way. He notes that the book is “defiantly middlebrow,” and I wonder just which highbrow thinkers about religion Orr believes Dawkins should have grappled with. I myself have looked over large piles of recent religious thought in the last few years in the course of researching my own book on these topics, and I have found almost all of it to be so dreadful that ignoring it entirely seemed both the most charitable and most constructive policy. (I devote a scant six pages of Breaking the Spell to the arguments for and against the existence of God, while Dawkins devotes roughly a hundred, laying out the standard arguments with admirable clarity and fairness, and skewering them efficiently.) There are indeed recherché versions of these traditional arguments that perhaps have not yet been exhaustively eviscerated by scholars, but Dawkins ignores them (as do I) and says why: his book is a consciousness-raiser aimed at the general religious public, not an attempt to contribute to the academic microdiscipline of philosophical theology. The arguments Dawkins exposes and rebuts are the arguments that waft from thousands of pulpits every week and reach millions of television viewers every day, and neither the televangelists nor the authors of best-selling spiritual books pay the slightest heed to the subtleties of the theologians either.

H. Allen Orr, A Mission to Convert - The New York Review of Books, January 11, 2007

Scientists’ interest in religion seems to come in waves. One arrived after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Another followed in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired by surprising revelations from quantum mechanics, which suggested the insufficiency of conventional physical theories of the universe. And now scientists are once again writing about religion, apparently provoked this time by the controversy surrounding intelligent design.

During the last year, a number of popular books on religion by scientists or philosophers of science have appeared. Daniel Dennett kicked things off with his Breaking the Spell (2006), an investigation into the possibility of a science of religion. Reviewing evolutionary, psychological, and economic theories of the origin and spread of belief, Dennett covered much ground but reached few conclusions. In the last few months, three prominent scientists—all biologists—have published their own books on belief. Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has given us The God Delusion, an extended polemic against faith, which will be considered at length below.

Stephen Jay Gould, Darwinian Fundamentalism, The New York Review of Books, June 12, 1997

With copious evidence ranging from Plato’s haughtiness to Beethoven’s tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot. But Charles Darwin must have been the most genial of geniuses. He was kind to a fault, even to the undeserving, and he never uttered a harsh word—or hardly ever, as his countryman Captain Corcoran once said. Darwin’s disciple, George Romanes, expressed surprise at the only sharply critical Darwinian statement he had ever encountered: “In the whole range of Darwin’s writings there cannot be found a passage so strongly worded as this: it presents the only note of bitterness in all the thousands of pages which he has published.” Darwin directed this passage that Romanes found so striking against people who would simplify and caricature his theory as claiming that natural selection, and only natural selection, caused all evolutionary changes. He wrote in the last (1872) edition of The Origin of Species:

As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position—namely at the close of the Introduction—the following words: “I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.” This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

Darwin clearly loved his distinctive theory of natural selection—the powerful idea that he often identified in letters as his dear “child.” But, like any good parent, he understood limits and imposed discipline. He knew that the complex and comprehensive phenomena of evolution could not be fully rendered by any single cause, even one so ubiquitous and powerful as his own brainchild.

In this light, especially given history’s tendency to recycle great issues, I am amused by an irony that has recently ensnared evolutionary theory. A movement of strict constructionism, a self-styled form of Darwinian fundamentalism, has risen to some prominence in a variety of fields, from the English biological heartland of John Maynard Smith to the uncompromising ideology (albeit in graceful prose) of his compatriot Richard Dawkins, to the equally narrow and more ponderous writing of the American philosopher Daniel Dennett (who entitled his latest book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea).[1] Moreover, a larger group of strict constructionists are now engaged in an almost mordantly self-conscious effort to “revolutionize” the study of human behavior along a Darwinian straight and narrow under the name of “evolutionary psychology.”

Hitchens and Boteach’s Great Debate - Forward.com, February 6, 2008

Acclaimed polemicist and atheist Christopher Hitchens traded wit on science and scripture last week at a debate titled “Does God Exist?” with his opponent, Orthodox rabbi and television host Shmuley Boteach.

Ticket holders filled the auditorium at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y to capacity; many hoped that Hitchens would demonstrate his irreverent, razor-edged reasoning. The fans weren’t disappointed.

“We’re all atheists,” Hitchens argued in his dry British timbre. “We no longer believe we need to tear the beating heart out of a virgin to make the sun rise. We no longer believe in the sun god Ra or in Zeus, and we now must go one step further.”

Nicholas Kristof, A Modest Proposal for a Truce on Religion, New York Times, December 3, 2006

If God is omniscient and omnipotent, you can’t help wondering why she doesn’t pull out a thunderbolt and strike down Richard Dawkins.

Or, at least, crash the Web site of www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com. That’s a snarky site that notes that while people regularly credit God for curing cancer or other ailments, amputees never seem to enjoy divine intervention.

“If God were answering the prayers of amputees to regenerate their lost limbs, we would be seeing amputated legs growing back every day,” the Web site declares, adding: “It would appear, to an unbiased observer, that God is singling out amputees and purposefully ignoring them.”

That site is part of an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive led in part by Professor Dawkins — the Oxford scientist who is author of the new best seller “The God Delusion.” It’s a militant, in-your-face brand of atheism that he and others are proselytizing for.

He counsels readers to imagine a world without religion and conjures his own glimpse: “Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers,’ no Northern Ireland ‘troubles,’ no ‘honor killings,’ no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money.”

Look elsewhere on the best-seller list and you find an equally acerbic assault on faith: Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Mr. Harris mocks conservative Christians for opposing abortion, writing: “20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. There is an obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgment: if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all.”

The number of avowed atheists is tiny, with only 1 to 2 percent of Americans describing themselves in polls as atheists. But about 15 percent now say that they are not affiliated with any religion, and this vague category is sometimes described as the fastest-growing “religious group” in America today (some surveys back that contention, while others don’t).

Irreligion - John Allen Paulos - Book Review - New York Times, January 13, 2008

A physicist, a biologist and a mathematician walk into a bar. Bartender says, “Any of you believe in God?” Which of the three is most likely to say yes? Answer: the mathematician. Mathematicians believe in God at a rate two and a half times that of biologists, a survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences a decade ago revealed. Admittedly, this rate is not very high in absolute terms. Only 14.6 percent of the mathematicians embraced the God hypothesis (versus 5.5 percent of the biologists).

Libby Purves, God rest you merry atheist, Times Online, December 18, 2007

But the really fabulous news I mentioned is that Richard Dawkins, Prophet of Atheism, has said in a BBC interview that he is not against “cultural” Christianity and “Yes, I like singing carols along with everyone else”. Which raises enough tantalising philosophical and ethical questions to keep us going till Christmas Eve. Dawkins sings carols? Does he sing all the words? Does he boom out lines about herald angels, holy nights, the tender Lamb promised from eternal years? Does he croon: “What can I give Him, poor as I am?” Does the polemicist who gave three eloquent pages to deconstructing the story of St Luke’s Gospel happily warble O Little Town of Bethlehem and Once in Royal David’s City? Does the man who says that religious education is tantamount to “child abuse” feel wholly comfortable crooning Away in a Manger?

God vs. Science - TIME, November 5, 2006

There are two great debates under the broad heading of Science vs. God. The more familiar over the past few years is the narrower of the two: Can Darwinian evolution withstand the criticisms of Christians who believe that it contradicts the creation account in the Book of Genesis? In recent years, creationism took on new currency as the spiritual progenitor of “intelligent design” (I.D.), a scientifically worded attempt to show that blanks in the evolutionary narrative are more meaningful than its very convincing totality. I.D. lost some of its journalistic heat last December when a federal judge dismissed it as pseudoscience unsuitable for teaching in Pennsylvania schools.

But in fact creationism and I.D. are intimately related to a larger unresolved question, in which the aggressor’s role is reversed: Can religion stand up to the progress of science? This debate long predates Darwin, but the antireligion position is being promoted with increasing insistence by scientists angered by intelligent design and excited, perhaps intoxicated, by their disciplines’ increasing ability to map, quantify and change the nature of human experience. Brain imaging illustrates–in color!–the physical seat of the will and the passions, challenging the religious concept of a soul independent of glands and gristle. Brain chemists track imbalances that could account for the ecstatic states of visionary saints or, some suggest, of Jesus. Like Freudianism before it, the field of evolutionary psychology generates theories of altruism and even of religion that do not include God. Something called the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology speculates that ours may be but one in a cascade of universes, suddenly bettering the odds that life could have cropped up here accidentally, without divine intervention.

‘I’m an atheist, BUT . . .’ by Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net, October 18, 2006

Of all the questions I fielded during the course of my recent book tour, the only ones that really depressed me were those that began “I’m an atheist, BUT . . .” What follows such an opening is nearly always unhelpful, nihilistic or – worse – suffused with a sort of exultant negativity. Notice, by the way, the distinction from another favourite genre: “I used to be an atheist, but . . .” That is one of the oldest tricks in the book, practised by, among many others, C S Lewis, Alister McGrath and Francis Collins. It is designed to gain street cred before the writer starts on about Jesus, and it is amazing how often it works. Look out for it, and be forewarned.

I’ve noticed five variants of I’m-an-atheist-buttery, and I’ll list them in turn, in the hope that others will recognize them, be armed against them, and perhaps extend the list by contributing examples from their own experience.

1. I’m an atheist, but religion is here to stay. You think you can get rid of religion? Good luck to you! You want to get rid of religion? What planet are you living on? Religion is a fixture. Get over it!

I could bear any of these downers, if they were uttered in something approaching a tone of regret or concern. On the contrary. The tone of voice is almost always gleeful, and accompanied by a self-satisfied smirk. Anybody who opens with “I’m an atheist, BUT . . .” can be more or less guaranteed to be one of those religious fellow-travellers who, in Dan Dennett’s wickedly perceptive phrase, believes in belief. They may not be religious themselves, but they love the idea that other people are religious. This brings me to my second category of naysayers.

2. I’m an atheist, but people need religion. What are you going to put in its place? How are you going to comfort the bereaved? How are you going to fill the need?

I dealt with this in the last chapter of The God Delusion, ‘A Much Needed Gap’ and also, at more length, in Unweaving the Rainbow. Here I’ll make one additional point. Did you notice the patronizing condescension in the quotations I just listed? You and I, of course, are much too intelligent and well educated to need religion. But ordinary people, hoi polloi, the Orwellian proles, the Huxleian Deltas and Epsilon semi-morons, need religion. Well, I want to cultivate more respect for people than that. I suspect that the only reason many cling to religion is that they have been let down by our educational system and don’t understand the options on offer. This is certainly true of most people who think they are creationists. They have simply not been taught the alternative. Probably the same is true of the belittling myth that people ‘need’ religion. On the contrary, I am tempted to say “I believe in people . . .” And this leads me to the next example.

Steven Weinberg, A deadly certitude - TLS, January 17, 2007

Given the battering that traditional religion has taken from the theory of evolution, it is fitting that the most energetic, eloquent and uncompromising modern adversaries of religion are biologists who helped us to understand evolution: first Francis Crick, and now Richard Dawkins. In The God Delusion, Dawkins caps a series of his books on biology and religion with a swingeing attack on every aspect of religion – not just traditional religion, but also the vaguer modern assortment of pieties that often appropriates its name. In the unkindest cut of all, Dawkins even argues that the persistence of belief in God is itself an outcome of natural selection – acting perhaps on our genes, as argued by Dean Hamer in The God Gene, but more certainly on our “memes”, the bundles of cultural beliefs and attitudes that in a Darwinian though non-biological way tend to be passed on from generation to generation. It is not that the meme helps the believer or the believer’s genes to survive; it is the meme itself that by its nature tends to survive.

For instance, the persistence of belief in a particular religion is naturally aided if that religion teaches that God punishes disbelief. Such a religion tends to survive if the threatened punishment is sufficiently awful. In contrast, a religion would have trouble keeping converts in line if it taught that infidels are subject after death to only a brief spell of mild discomfort, after which they join the faithful in eternal bliss. So it is natural that in traditional Christianity and Islam, disbelief became the ultimate crime, and Hell the ultimate torture chamber. No wonder the mathematician Paul Erdos always referred to God as the Supreme Fascist. Dawkins’s book focuses on Christianity and Islam, which traditionally emphasize the importance of belief, rather than on religions like Judaism, Hinduism or Shinto, which are tied to specific ethnic groups, and tend to stress observance more than faith.

Dawkins, like Erdos, dislikes God. He calls the God of the Old Testament “the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”. As for the New Testament, he quotes with approval the opinion of Thomas Jefferson, that “The Christian God is a being of a terrific character – cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust”. This is strong stuff, and Dawkins obviously intends to shock the reader, but his invective has a constructive purpose. By attacking the God of sacred Scripture, he is trying to weaken the authority of that God’s commands – commands whose interpretation has led humanity to a shameful history of inquisitions, crusades and jihads. Dawkins treats the reader to many brutal details, but we only have to look at today’s headlines to supply our own. For some reason, Dawkins does not comment on the God of the Koran, who would seem to provide equal opportunities for invective.

Norman Levitt, What a Friend We Have in Dawkins, and Michael Shermer, Arguing for Atheism, Skeptic, January 31, 2007

Discourse in this country is sometimes held in such a death-grip by religion that a genial “up yours” directed thereto is, perhaps, the only way to initiate a meaningful conversation on matters theological. Dawkins certainly supplies one in his recent book, The God Delusion. He is the Voice of Faith and Inspiration (as a fundamentalist radio station in my neighborhood used to style itself) though the faith, of course, is in the penetrating power of human reason in the absence of any cosmic Imaginary Friend, while what he inspires is chiefly a determination not to be intimidated by the religiosity that saturates our culture.

Dawkins is a wondrously efficient and beguiling writer — colloquial, unpretentious, and direct, notwithstanding his deep erudition and the exacting reasoning he continually deploys. The obvious comparison is to Bertrand Russell, a thinker with similar views and a similar gift for turning a devastating phrase. But Dawkins’s virtues also include easy familiarity with popular culture, American as well as British. He cleverly uses it to gain the ear of an audience that, perhaps, would be a bit put off by a purely academic style.

It is greatly encouraging to note that this book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over four straight months (as of January, 2007), and that this is not just a one-shot deal. It’s a good bet that ten or fifteen years ago, that wouldn’t have been the case. Until relatively recently, most mainstream publishers would likely have treated any work heaping scorn on conventional belief as pure poison, commercially. Why has the climate changed so much? My own guess is that the surge of the religious Right into the corridors of power has put many heretofore diffident unbelievers into a position where a fight-or-flight choice has to be made. Many — not only those who write in defense of godlessness, but also a wide spectrum of literate intellectuals — have chosen to fight, disdaining the notion that tactful silence best serves the right to unbelief. In any event, the infidels are now out in force to an extent not seen since the glory days of Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken. Today’s primus inter pares amongst the paladins of rationalism is Dawkins, who, though British down to his toes, fights brilliantly on American soil.

The ideal readership for The God Delusion consists neither of grizzled old infidels like me nor of those still clinging to the frayed shrouds of faith who might be persuaded to turn them loose by a few more well-honed arguments. Instead, the book is best suited to a rather young reader — in the 15-to-30 demographic, say — who has recently discarded religion (or simply realized that it was never part of his or her makeup) and whose major need is for an arsenal of conceptual and rhetorical strategies to deal with peer hostility, cultural and political pressures, familial unhappiness, and so forth.