He, Michael McGhee, being a man who out-Armstrongs Karen Armstrong and others who play on similar themes to hers. Where they like to say that religion is as much about practice as it is about belief, McGhee is happy to get rid of the idea of belief altogether. Inclining towards secular humanism himself, he nonetheless has the confidence to insist that religion isn't about belief in anything:
[W]hat is it to believe in God? It may seem strange, but it is not a matter of believing that there is a God.
Well, I must say that's very handy. It would allow me - and Michael too, why not? - to believe in God, without either of us having to believe there is one. It's that straightforward. In fact, all secular humanists could believe in God on the same basis. And it's handy in another way too. Over to Michael again:
It sounds paradoxical to claim that believers do not believe that there is a God, but this is only because it seems to imply that they believe that there isn't. We should take "belief that there is (or isn't) a God" out of the equation.
Paradoxical is one way of putting this; reductio ad absurdum is another. Defence of the idea of God here ends up by evacuating that idea of all content; it becomes a collection of purely human commitments. Apply the method to belief in anything else and you'd be regarded as making life easy for yourself.