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in tandem with the universal structures of human nature to produce the manifold of human societies. In Loyal Rue’s account, religions arose within each culture in the course of biological evolution. The roots of religion are the general need to maximize reproductive fitness through the strategy of
achieving personal wholeness and social coherence by means of educating the emotions and unifying the worldview.exert a decisive influence on human behavior by engaging and organizing human neural systems for the sake of human survival. The problem with the (^26) Religious traditions thereby
religions today is that they no longer produce adaptive benefits. Religions sow the seeds of discord and violence. They have become an obstacle to human survival.The new atheism has its own intellectual tradition of those thinkers who
have reflected on the natural history of religion, including Kant, Feuerbach, Strauss, Nietzsche, and Freud, all of whom we explored before. The new atheists tend to be ignorant of this tradition of critique. They write as if they were the first generation to engage in the frontal assault on religious belief
and practice. Their lack of communal rituals is what most separates the new atheists from traditional religious communities. At best we can say their rituals are reading, writing, and discussing. Enlightenment is the experience at which their practice aims: freedom from religious superstition and the
courage to assume responsibility for their own lives. The chief artistic form is rhetorical. The new atheists aim to persuade. They seem intent on build-ing up institutional structures to compete with those of the religions. Dawkins includes “a partial list of friendly addresses, for individuals needing
support in escaping from religion” as an appendix to It includes contact information for 19 groups, such as the American Humanist Athe functional equivalent of churches for new atheism.ssociation, the American Atheists, and the like. These groups are The God Delusion.^27
We have examined extreme forms of religion within the situation of explod-ing pluralism in the USA. It is hardly surprising that in this situation of the True Religion
scathing criticism of religion by secular humanists colliding with the reli-gion of true believers many people are open but simply uncommitted. Apathy and exhaustion now seep through the culture and into the souls of people. Theological humanism must fashion a response to this complex situ-
ation. Taking exclusionist Christianity as a form of hypertheism, and secular humanism as a type of overhumanization, we can ask two questions. What is