"The Meaning of Belief," by Tim Crane

I found Tim Crane's approach to relations between atheists ("we atheists," I should state clearly) and the religious far more satisfactory than the New Atheism's dogmatics as I understand them.  On the other hand, I'm not sure that the New Atheism's dogmatics really exist except as essayists' proposals -- they don't represent anything that's been agreed on, a consensus that is to say, or anything that has been tested for effectiveness.  Crane's approach isn't really satisfactory either, but that's on the premise held by so many British philosophers that nothing is ever really satisfactory, and that such limitations should be accepted and even made the foundation of a way of moving forward.  I spent twenty plus years as a practicing Catholic who didn't really believe in any of the dogma of the faith, so I can testify to the accuracy of Crane's emphasis on identity and a sense of a need for greater meaning, as opposed to any pseudo-scientific mythology, as the base of religious practice for many.  The only area in which I think Crane really falls short is in his willingness to place very little blame for violence on religious affiliation; this doesn't invalidate his argument, but it causes me to wonder why he felt it so important to attribute similar levels of violence to non-religious groups throughout the twentieth century.  Christians were deeply complicit in the Holocaust, on the one hand; and the violence that led to mass deaths via imprisonment and famine in the Soviet Union and China were not the result of non-religious group practice equivalent to that of ISIS, say, but rather the practices of totalitarian governments.  Such distinctions are meaningful to me, but seemingly not to Crane.