I'll be speaking today on a sort of, I guess you could call it a kind of ruminative topic

where I don't necessarily have a clear thesis, but I'm going to discuss sort of what I see as

the state of the religious landscape in the United States, and particularly sort of a kind of tripartite division in American religious and metaphysical

worldviews that I think might be helpful in explaining sort of what's going on in American

life generally, it has implications for politics, social social life the life of our churches

and so on so that's that's what I'm going to try and do and I'll do that for about

30 minutes or so and then you can raise questions that will probably be more

incisive than my own point I was trying to figure out a good way into this

topic before this afternoon,

and I think I'm going to use an interesting blog post that was written,

I think, yesterday or the day before, by a somewhat prolific blogger in the Bay Area

named Scott Alexander, who a few of you may have read,

who writes about social science, all kinds of various issues from a sort of rationalist

contrarian perspective. And he was writing about the phenomenon of the new atheism that was

big about 10 or 15 years ago,

embodied by figures like the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris,

and others slightly more obscure voices.

And what he was wondering was, why is the new atheism sort of considered kind of intellectually de-classé among

liberals and on the political left and he said that you know when he sort of trolls the

internet and reads people talking about the new atheists there's always the

sense of people saying well you know you know, who are these guys,

you know, even though I might agree with them, they're just sort of saying the obvious and

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