I am certain that taking issue with a fellow Psychology Today author in my very first post for this Web site is a gross violation of PT blogger etiquette. So I'm going to go ahead and to my editors in advance and cross my fingers that they don't hit the kill switch on this blog before anyone has a chance to visit. But rather than waste your time with small talk about who I am and why I'm here, let me go ahead and say I respectfully disagree with Nigel Barber and his post "Why atheism will replace religion," which appeared recently on his excellent PT blog, The Human Beast. I respectfully disagree with him a lot.

I do not disagree with Dr. Barber because I doubt his data showing patterns of waning belief and churchgoing around the world and his hypotheses about their causes, because I don't, although I'm certainly aware of competing theories. I also do not disagree with him because I am myself religious, because I'm not; in fact, I could be a living, breathing statistic in the studies he cites. I disagree with him because I've seen the emotional and nourishment that most human beings get from their faith and I don't see anything taking its place. As long as that's the case, I believe we do ourselves a disservice if we assume that the only reason it exists is because certain people have yet to evolve beyond it.

Psychology Today has given me the opportunity to continue this intellectual and emotional journey, and I couldn't be more excited. In this blog, I'll be writing about the allure of religion for people like my brother, who was raised the same way I was and yet chose to become a Christian at the age of 17. I'll be writing about the millions of Americans who say they have no religion, most of whom don't classify themselves as atheists and many of whom ultimately end up back in church. I'll be writing about how religion influences , one of the life events that brings the unchurched to church, some for the first time. And I'll be writing about the role of faith in American society and the free market that is constantly enlivening organized religion even as it is withering away elsewhere.

Dr. Barber is right that, statistically speaking, a decline in religious activity has coincided with modernity in many societies, including this one. And yet he is not the first, nor will he be the last, to conclude based on such data that religion's days are numbered. My is that this assumption will lead to ignore the reality of how important religion remains today, in America and around the world. I worry that it will cause people to caricature those for whom it still is relevant as less intelligent, less modern, less important. I don't believe that, and I definitely don't want my children to believe that. If they are going to understand the world, they need to understand religious belief, and that requires engagement with and for people who have it. It also requires, dare I say, an to the fact that science doesn't yet satisfy every one of our needs.

In my lifetime, I've seen a polarization of our country -- and my family -- along religious lines. I'd like to see those lines start to blur and for people on both sides to start looking for common ground. That won't settle the question of whether humanity will ultimately be guided by faith or by reason. But it might make life a little more tolerable while my kids and I are here.