by Zoë Pollock
Terry Eagleton doesn't play nice in his review of The Joy of Secularism. He posits that "societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it":
Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. … If Friedrich Nietzsche was the first sincere atheist, it is because he saw that the Almighty is exceedingly good at disguising Himself as something else, and that much so-called secularisation is accordingly bogus.
The Dish 