Deeper Than God: Ronald Dworkin’s Religious Atheism

A good review and overview by Stanley Fish in the NYTimes of Ronald Dworkin’s last book, Religion without God. Some of the argumentation is complex, but treating belief and non-belief as equal rights (freedom of and freedom from religion), and how liberals recreate an ethnical framework, is of interest. Quote:

By “ethical independence” Dworkin means the individual’s independence to decide for himself or herself how to acknowledge the “felt conviction that the universe really does embody a sublime beauty.” One form of acknowledgment might be the practice of theism — traditional religion with its rituals, sacred texts, formal prayers, proscribed and prescribed activities; but the conviction of the universe’s beauty does not, says Dworkin, “suppose any god” as its ground. Once we see this, we are on the way to “decoupling religion from a god” and admitting into the ranks of the religious those who are possessed by that conviction but do not trace it back to any deity. They will be, Dworkin declares, “religious atheists.”

Deeper Than God: Ronald Dworkin’s Religious Atheism