Better God-fearing than sneering
By Stephanie Merritt
For some years, AC Grayling and Richard Dawkins have been the good cop/bad cop of anti-religious thought. Dawkins publicly fights fire with fire, while Grayling has opted for a gentler advocacy of humanist values. But now, in Against All Odds, a little collection of his reworked newspaper essays, a distinct note of exasperation has crept in. ‘If the tone of the polemics here seems combative,’ Grayling writes, ‘it is because the contest between religious and non-religious outlooks is such an important one, a matter literally of life and death, and there can be no temporising.’
