Preserving Faith
• Skeptics & Atheists
From a review of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett:
The stewards' chief aim is to preserve their chosen religion from damaging criticism, which they do by making, as Dennett puts it in another of his sudden shivers of outrage and distaste, "their beliefs incomprehensible even to themselves" : introducing, for example, things such as virgin births, three people in one, and the conviction that all the world's misfortunes are due to two ancestors eating an apple - or was it a pear?