Man is manifestly not the measure of all things.  This universe is shot through with mystery.  The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.  The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and ground for any experience we may wish to call “spiritual.”  No myth needs to be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance.  No personal God need be worshipped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation.  No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.  The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered.  Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather to much, on how soon we realize this.

If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised too, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith.  If our tribalism is ever to give way to an extended moral identity, our religious beliefs can no longer be sheltered from the tides of genuine inquiry and genuine criticism.  It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil.  Wherever conviction grows in inverse proportion to its justification, we have lost the very basis for human cooperation.  Where we have reason for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another.  People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.  The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world;  we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.