It is no longer taken for granted that nonbelievers are outside the realm of the human. That was the case in medieval Christendom: to be a nonbeliever was ipso facto to be evil, to have set yourself against the delights of all that is humanly worth attaining. Perhaps there are some fanatical religious subcultures that manage to sustain this exclusionary belief today. But insofar as a religious believer’s belief in God is consistent with the idea that there are admirable people who nevertheless do not believe, as for the most part is the case in the modern West, then religious belief cannot by
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