This is funny stuff. Why does anyone pretend that there's any originality to "free thinkers" or "brights" or whatever term the appropriate margins of intelligentsia prefer these days? Wake me up when you've got an idea that's not a couple of thousand years old, guys. One of the ancient arguments for atheism is that the world seems to work just fine on its own, with no need for God. Never has been convincing to any but a tiny fraction of people, and never will be.

". . .Darwinian competition between belief systems. . .."

Well, the book itself must be read to understand what the author makes of this.

We should expect to find a connection established between religions and systems of folkways and institutions and then between those folkways and institutions and material power.

These village atheist types never want to confront this two-step connection, because it confirms the utility of religion as a way to find a balance between control and freedom and between continuity and adaptation.

We shall see whether Dennett understands that this analysis is not from Darwin but rather from other Nineteenth Century thought, not from biology, but from sociology.

Contemporary thinkers still shy away from Spencerism, and misname it "Darwinism," just because of multicultural squeamishness. If you start looking at religions from the outside, you must perforce comparatively evaluate them from outside. It is only as a "religion"--a matter of what an individual "believes"-- that one religion is as good at another. As a matter of what works, of what surpasses and what goes under religions may indeed be weighed in the balance.

Now the premier survival trait for a social system is adaptability. Spencer himself understoood this very well, by the way. Ossification is death. A religion which holds its people back from adapting may exhibit short-term vitality, but in the end it is doomed to be surpassed.

Thus the above closing comment about the unfitness of the Darwinist religion is most apt. It should by now be incontrovertible that systems of ordered liberty, which is only possible in the presence of certain religions, find a balance of discipline and creativity not available to the other systems, which systems include atheism.

Check out this charming fellow:

The best player of this game that I ever knew was Professor G.H. Hardy, a world-famous mathematician who happened to be a passionate atheist.[...] During my tenure, Professor Simpson, one of the old and famous fellows, died. Simpson had a strong sentimental attachment to the college and was a religious believer. He left instructions that he should be cremated and his ashes should be scattered on the bowling green in the fellows' garden [....] A few days after he died, a solemn funeral service was held for him in the college chapel.

In the evening of the same day [....] Professor Hardy, contrary to his usual habit, was late for dinner. After we had all sat down and the Latin grace had been said, Hardy strolled into the dining hall, ostentatiously scraping his shoes on the wooden floor and complaining in a loud voice for everyone to hear, "What is this awful stuff they have put on the grass in the fellows' garden? I can't get it off my shoes." Hardy, of course, knew very well what the stuff was.

Hardy was a prototypical Hollow Man:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/443/

OJ:

Interesting that he felt depressed over not being absolutely the world's greatest mathematician -- that reminds me of a smirking, pompous scientist who once said that Stephen Hawking receives too much attention and is "only" one of the top 20 theoretical physicists in the world. Golly, what could be worse than that?

I remember reading that Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (who was an atheist and supposedly a horribly ill-mannered person) said something similar at the end of his life: that even though he made monumental mathematical achievements and won a Nobel Prize he felt it hadn't really amounted to much.