An interview with the author of Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Sounds interesting. This quote struck a chord:
There’s been an enormous focus in the field of religious studies over the very term “religion,” and half the discipline wants to reject it all together. My own problem with definitions of religion, and why I use them only as starting points, is that they too often concern only beliefs. But religion is a thing you do. The misinterpretation of people like Dawkins and Hitchens is that religion is just a mistaken proto-science. But religion is about action, and faith is about trust.
This gets to the heart of a main concern with the New Atheists’ agenda. By focussing on and critiquing the scientific basis of religion, they are effectively using a straw man argument. Humans are not, and should never be, wholly rational beings. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that sometimes we’re not very rational at all. There’s a place for religion, philosophy and art, as well as science, in the pursuit of finding out what makes us tick, both individually and collectively.