Judging practices

There's a poor argument made here by Paula Cerni against those she calls the 'four formidable horsemen' of atheism - Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. She writes:

[A]lthough truth is a worthy cause, the New Atheists' strategy rests on a misguided approach to religion. Religion involves practices as well as beliefs. The New Atheists begin from the beliefs and take them to inform the practices. They therefore aim their fire at the mightiest of all false beliefs, the belief in God Almighty.

The scientific, materialist approach should begin from the practices. Practices inform beliefs, since beliefs that matter are always practical. But practices are never false - they occur and in that sense they are true; they are real and in that sense they are rational. They are taken up by living agents in historical settings.

The argument is plainly fallacious. Cerni elides real with true and rational, but doesn't explain why. Any real practice is - tautologically - real, but in so far as it implies or secretes certain beliefs, those may, but also may not be, true or rational. If I leave a twenty pound note on my garden wall every Saturday evening with a letter attached to it saying 'This money is mine', I might believe that the letter will deter everyone from taking the money, but that belief will almost certainly be false and my practice, real as may be, won't be altogether rational unless I want the money taken.

Though what she says misses its mark, Cerni does at least identify the site of a genuine question for those who inveigh against religious beliefs and the people who hold them - inveigh as opposed merely to saying why they think such beliefs are false. The genuine question concerns beliefs which, on the evidence we have, are groundless, but which appear nonetheless to answer to some important need that many people have. Here's an analogy. Your friend suffers a bereavement, and in the weeks after it speaks to you - an atheist - about how she has felt strenghened and consoled by knowing that her deceased mother or husband or son has gone to God. Even as an atheist you don't - I'm confident in you on this score - deride her for saying it; you don't even tell her politely that she shouldn't rely on illusions of this sort. You just accept that her belief has helped her through a difficult time. How show that degree of human understanding in the individual case, and yet be unable to make the transition to comprehending it as part of a larger picture involving millions of people?

Cerni's piece, incidentally, is of broadly Marxist inspiration. Religion for her is 'an organ for soothing the aches of social injury'. But not all injury is social. And not all human ills are remediable. This is another limitation in her view.