It never fails ...

... post about the works and pomps of evangelical atheism and everybody pipes up: Delusional NIge. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I wouldn't make too much of commuters reading The God Delusion. Were I a commuter I might well have read it on the train myself, since I reviewed it and have to read the books I review in whatever moments I can grab. I don't think it is a good book judged by the standard set by Dawkins's other books. The organization is haphazard and the hectoring tone grating. As with other recent atheist tracts, it suffers from an identification of religion with churches and creeds. Churches and creeds are a consequence of religion, a manifestation of it, not the cause of it, just as literature is a product of language, not the cause of it. Which is why the religious impulse is so discernible in the writings of Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins, and why they come off merely as secular counterparts to the fire-and-brimstone preachers they claim to loathe.