Being an Atheist in America Isn't Easy - Newsweek Society - MSNBC.com

Being an Atheist in America Isn't Easy - Newsweek Society - MSNBC.com:

"'Breaking the Spell,' by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, which asks how and why religions became ubiquitous in human society. The obvious answer—'Because they're true'—is foreclosed, Dennett says, by the fact that they are by and large mutually incompatible. Even to study 'religion as a natural phenomenon,' the subtitle of Dennett's book, is to deprive it of much of its mystery and power. And next month the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins ('The Selfish Gene') weighs in with 'The God Delusion,' a book that extends an argument he advanced in the days after 9/11. After hearing once too often that '[t]o blame the attacks on Islam is like blaming Christianity for the fighting in Northern Ireland,' Dawkins responded: Precisely. 'It's time to get angry,' he wrote, 'and not only with Islam.'"