Don't be smug, it's unattractive

Barry Gewen, on the New York Times Book Review's "Paper Cuts" blog:

It’s hardly news that religious sentiments emerge out of deeply felt emotions. It’s only our modern secularists and rationalists — like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali — who can claim to ground their lives wholly in the dictates of reason and scientific fact. Yet here comes the noted philosopher Charles Taylor, winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize, to tell the rationalists not to be smug. In his difficult, digressive, repetitious, exasperating and indispensable book “A Secular Age,” Taylor insists that the secularists operate out of a belief system of their own, just as believers do. They’ve merely exchanged one set of assumptions about the cosmos and the meaning of life for another.

More at "Paper Cuts."