This book is not an attack on faith.
I want to be precise about this from the first page because the
distinction matters and because I intend to honor it throughout. The
experience of faith, the private interior encounter between a human
consciousness and what it understands as the sacred, is not what this
book is about. That experience is real in the sense that all experiences are
real, in the sense that the person having it is genuinely having it, and it is
not my purpose to diminish or dismiss it.
What this book is about is the institution. The organization. The
system. The apparatus that has been built, across six thousand years of
recorded human history, to produce, distribute, and monetize that
experience of the sacred at scale