Jonathan Rée writes about Daniel Dennett in the current issue of New Humanist:
[T]hose of us who do not believe in any religion would do well to avoid taking our atheism to puritanical extremes: we need to remind ourselves that most of what we prize in human culture has been handed down to us by religious believers, and that we may never succeed in filleting out all the bits that are not to our naturalistic taste.
Our problem is not just about the continuing validity of religious works of art, music and literature, or the vast tracts of the natural sciences that were built on theistic assumptions about the regularity and uniformity of God’s creation and the absolute universality of its laws. There are also everyday practical issues where the only guidance we are likely to find comes from notions that have more than a whiff of religiosity about them – issues not so much of accuracy as of grace, or of what you might call moral poetry as opposed to moral accountancy.For example we may find ourselves pondering the ethics of mourning – how long should we dwell on the death of someone we loved, and how much ought we to want to be unhappy? Or the ethics of reverence: ought we to curb an impulse to piss on gravestones, or shout in churches, or violate a corpse, even if we can sure that no one will be harmed in any way?