KEY POINTS:
Who said religion was dead - and dead boring? All right, it may have been me, back in my non-believer days, but I take it all back.
If religion was truly in its death throes, of little interest or relevance to the irreligious, there'd be no need or ready market for the current wave of stridently anti-religious books from the so-called New Atheists - Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and now Christopher Hitchens - all of whom want to save us, and the world, from our religious delusions.
Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, and tagged as "Darwin's Rottweiller", just wants the religious to come to their senses.
As he writes in the foreword to his bestselling, The God Delusion: "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down."
I'm afraid he failed with me - but I was already familiar with the arguments.
What distinguishes the new breed of atheists from their more polite forerunners is their virulence, hostility and arrogance.
Neo-atheists tend not to make any distinction between religions, or between moderates and extremists. And they display the kind of absolute certainty they scorn in the most fanatical extremists. Atheists know best; atheists have reason on their side.
As one commentator has observed, we've swapped religious intolerance for irreligious intolerance.
The latest is Christopher Hitchens, author, journalist and critic, who is as eloquent as he is vituperative.
In God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything he declares: "Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago."
He insults all religions. Mahatma Gandhi was "an obscurantist" who retarded and distorted Indian independence; Martin Luther King was a plagiarist and an orgiast and in no real sense a Christian; and the Dalai Lama "a medieval princeling" who perpetuates "a parasitic monastic elite".
I feel like James Wood, an avowed atheist who wrote in the New Yorker: "I have an almost infinite capacity for the consumption of atheist texts, but there is a limit to the number of times one can be told that the Bible is a shaky text, and that Leviticus and Deuteronomy are full of really nasty things."
Yes, we all know that bad things have been done under religious pretexts. But why blame religion for its failed recruits?
And why give so little credit to religion's good works; to the debt owed by Western society to the Judaeo-Christian tradition; to the fact that without Christianity we wouldn't have public hospitals and schools, human rights, the protection of children and women, the abolition of slavery, our charitable institutions, and the legal protections and freedoms we cherish so dearly?
Religion has its health benefits, too. A paper in the Medical Journal of Australia this month argues that "a stronger spiritual dimension" could counter the damaging effects of materialism and individualism.
Perhaps all this activity is a sign of "secular panic", as one critic suggested.
Religion has proved more resilient than predicted, and the idea that modernity would equal less religion has turned out to be wrong, "except in Europe, where it has proven half-right", writes John DiIulio jnr in the Weekly Standard.
But Europe still has more Christians than any other continent (500 million), and Christianity's slide there has been accompanied by growth in other faiths.
Elsewhere, Christianity is growing, with two billion Christians worldwide; Christianity in its various forms is the fastest-growing religion in the world.
Why? The answers aren't likely to come from Dawkins, Hitchens et al.
Last month, eminent British scientist and practising Jew Lord Robert Winston condemned Dawkins for what he called his "patronising" and "insulting" attitude to religious faith, and argued that he and others like him were doing a disservice to science.
Winston told the Guardian, scientists are prone to their own "science delusion".
"There is a body of scientific opinion from my scientific colleagues who seem to believe that science is the absolute truth and that religious and spiritual values are to be discounted. Some people, both scientists and religious people, deal with uncertainty by being certain. That is dangerous in the fundamentalists and in the fundamentalist scientists".
I doubt Albert Einstein would have been impressed either.
"What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility towards the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos," he once said.
"Fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after a hard struggle. They are creatures who - in their grudge against traditional religion as 'the opium of the masses' - cannot hear the music of the spheres."
