Challenge: Religion Needs the Devil

For this week's challenge: Your friend posts this on your Facebook wall...

What do you say? Can you break down all the specific claims included in this statement? Can you identify the main claim being made here? What are the hidden assumptions? What would you address first? When you're talking to someone and he throws something like this out, you have to be able to get to the heart of his concern quickly and address it. And it might not be something that was explicitly said. If you get too bogged down going step by step through every sentence, you might lose him, but if you can put your finger on the main issue and address that, you should have an interesting conversation.

We'll hear back from Alan on Thursday with his response.