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It is hard being an atheist with a sense of proportion. No one in this country will persecute you and it's not really very hard to disbelieve in God, but the temptation to strike attitudes in front of the universe persists, even in people who are about to spend 450 pages arguing that the universe is not the sort of thing that might be impressed. Thus, Daniel Dennett writes early in this book: "I for one am not in awe of your faith. I am appalled by your arrogance, by your unreasoning certainty that you have all the answers" - and he's not talking about Richard Dawkins. He goes on: "I wonder if any believers in the End Times will have the intellectual honesty and courage to read this book through."

[...]

Another great advantage to Dennett's book is that he sees that religious belief is not really propositional. The next president of the US could be a man who believes that America was peopled by one of the lost tribes of Israel and visited extensively by Jesus in pre-Columbian times; that it makes sense to baptise your dead ancestors and that all these truths were revealed, on tablets of gold, by a being called the Angel Moroni, to a farmhand in upstate New York. Mitt Romney, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, and a serious presidential candidate, is a Mormon. Richard Dawkins might regard Romney's professed beliefs as evidence of simple insanity. Dennett sees that their status is more complicated and interesting than that. He understands that modern religions derive their coherence precisely from the fact that a creed is a statement of belonging as much as of belief.

So he doesn't skirt the complications of theorising about religion: he sees the difficulties, marches bravely into the swamp and then - about half way through the book, at exactly the point where we're wondering how to reach firm ground - he stops, inflates a hot air balloon that's labelled "memes", climbs into it and floats away.

Memes are familiar to readers of Dennett's earlier work. They are ideas, words, tunes, strategies, catchphrases - anything that people can copy, or appear to copy, from one another. In every case where the word is used, it can be replaced by one of these other terms with a corresponding gain in precision and explanatory power.

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I like Scott Adam's take on beliefs:

[ 04 April 2006: Message edited by: Kindly Wise ]