Lonely Atheists

I've been thinking about the review of Christopher Hitchen's all day, a few years ago when I was first starting along my road to increased observance, I came across this brilliant article by Michael Novak, that reviews the works of Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and it has always stuck with me. I feel that similarly to the other three authors Hitchen's misses the fundamental point about religion and other peoples relationship to it. I hope and pray that this will help clarify what I wrote earlier this morning.

The whole inner world of aware and self-questioning religious persons seems to be territory unexplored by our authors. All around them are millions who spend many moments each day (and hours each week) in communion with God. Yet of the silent and inward parts of these lives - and why these inner silences ring to those who share them so true, and seem more grounded in reality than anything else in life - our writers seem unaware. Surely, if our atheist friends were to reconsider their methods, and deepen their understanding of such terms as 'experience' and 'the empirical,' they might come closer to walking for a tentative while in the moccasins of so many of their more religious companions in life, who find theism more intellectually satisfying - less self-contradictory, less alienating from their own nature - than atheism.