“[M]y mouth was saying things my head rejected.” Kate Cohen recalls why she set aside her Jewish faith to become an atheist. Atheism “throws into question what most people believe to be true and normal and right. No wonder we are widely disliked cultural minorities: our very existence makes people feel bad about themselves. An atheist’s existence says, ‘You have been duped.’” Simply put, she adds, “there’s a stigma attached to the absence or rejection of religious belief.”
In We of Little Faith, Cohen, a Washington Post columnist, created “a work that is so honest and relatable, it begged me to quietly close the book…and stare up at the ceiling in reflection,” David Reinbold reports. “Somebody gets it, I found myself thinking….” He, writing for TheHumanist.com, found in Cohen “somebody who values attributes such as logic, honesty, and truth.”
Andrew Seidel says likewise. Here’s “atheism as it should be, as it truly is,” this constitutional attorney at the Freedom From Religion Foundation declares. “This is the quotidian atheism your friends and family may be too timid to discuss, but which Cohen illuminates with absorbing eloquence. If you think about religion, you owe it to yourself to read this book.”
We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (And Maybe You Should Too)
By Kate Cohen
Godine, 2023