Are Sacred Texts Sacred? the Challenge for Atheists

By CARLIN ROMANO

In a Nation essay this year about the wave of successful books vaunting atheism, critic Daniel Lazare wrote the following:

For a long time, religion had been doing quite nicely as a kind of minor entertainment. Christmas and Easter were quite unthinkable without it, not to mention Hanukkah and Passover. But then certain enthusiasts took things too far by crashing airliners into office towers in the name of Allah, launching a global crusade to rid the world of evil, and declaring the jury still out on Darwinian evolution. As a consequence, religion now looks nearly as bad as royalism did in the late 18th century.