Richard Dawkins may provide lifelong atheists like me some much-needed moral support in his wide-ranging, witty, and intelligent screed The God Delusion, but this book isn’t really for us. Deeply religious people might profit from reading it, but it isn’t really for them, either, and they’re probably the least likely ever to pick this book up. Dawkins is aiming at people who have their doubts about religion but see no easy way to reject it or to separate themselves from it.

He tackles the familiar arguments for religion, among them the ontological proof and the argument from design, uses natural selection and evolutionary theory to construct an argument against God’s likely existence, and attacks the claims of religion to be any kind of useful guide to morals. Many religious people, and even some who harbor doubts, cling to a particular faith largely because it was the one in which they were raised, and also because it provides them with a social system, usually one with very strong bonds in the case of traditional or fundamentalist religions. (Dawkins points out in his introduction that atheists, secular humanists, and freethinkers, independent sorts who are extremely distrustful of authority, haven’t organized the kinds of social structures that might compete with religions here.) Another reason for religion is as a basis for morals; too many people assume that ethics must be grounded in an absolute, such as God, and that only immorality can result from rejecting such belief; in other words, goodness requires God. Dawkins demolishes such claims and along the way recounts several lurid Bible stories that show just how unsuited that Bronze Age document for pastoral tribespeople is as any kind of guide to morality. One might just as well be guided by The Secret History of the Mongols, and the New Testament, with its doctrine of atonement, isn’t much better. Dawkins’s most controversial claim may be that religious indoctrination, especially of the more rigid, fundamentalist variety, constitutes a form of child abuse (anyone who doubts this might check out the recent documentary “Jesus Camp” and view the obvious mental torment of the children in the movie) and also teaches the child that certain things shouldn’t be questioned—about the last attitude any truly open advanced technological society should be encouraging.

Dawkins points out that he is not advocating getting rid of all religious artifacts and practices. Celebrating Christmas or Passover preserves treasured cultural customs (Dawkins has admitted in a recent interview that he enjoy Christmas carols), and Dawkins notes that the appreciation of much Western literature requires a grounding in the Bible as literature. (My very limited acquaintance with literature in predominantly Muslim countries indicates that a thorough knowledge of the Qur’an may be very useful there as well.) In any case, it isn’t usually freethinkers who go around destroying art or music, religiously inspired as much of it is, but those who are most closely wedded to rigid religious beliefs.

Some will think Dawkins has been extremely rude (to put it mildly) in this lively polemic. I disagree. Living in a country where religion is affecting social policy for the worse, “intelligent design” crackpots are threatening our educational system (we have enough trouble educating our children in science as it is), an atheist neighbor of mine is careful not to reveal her beliefs to many of the people she knows while the religious never miss a chance to get in one’s face about their beliefs (and I live in a relatively progressive region), while those running for political office are pretty much required to profess belief in a religion, we would be far better off with more skeptics.