But as I read some of the critiques it struck me that the Hirsi Ali path as she describes it is actually unusually legible to atheists, in the sense that it matches well with how a lot of smart secular analysts assume that religions take shape and sustain themselves. In these assumptions, the personal need for religion reflects the fear of death or the desire for cosmic meaning (illustrated by Hirsi Ali’s yearning for “solace”), while the rise of organized religion mostly reflects the societal need for a unifying moral-metaphysical structure, a shared narrative, a glue to bind a complex society together (illustrated by her desire for a religious system to undergird her political worldview). For instance, in Ara Norenzayan’s 2015 book “Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict,” the great world religions are portrayed as technologies of social trust, encouraging pro-social behavior (“Watched people are nice people” is one of Norenzayan’s formulations, with moralistic gods as the ultimate guarantor of good behavior) as societies scale up from hunter-gatherer bands to urbanized states. At a certain point, the social and governmental order becomes sufficiently trustworthy itself that people begin to kick away the ladder of supernatural belief; hence secularization in the developed world. Even if belief in invisible watchers has its social uses, if such beings don’t exist it’s a pretty odd thing that societies the world over have converged on the belief that we share the cosmos with them.

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Persons: Hirsi Ali, Hirsi Ali’s, ” Organizations: Trinity Locations: Ara