It's more important than feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. The author is correct in saying that atheists and religious fundamentalists tend to share and important trait in common. They both believe that reality adheres to concrete truths. There is no problem with this belief, it is demonstrably true in any arbitrary set of situations. Either the toast landed butter-side up, or butter-side down. The ovens temperature is at a certain level right now, not any other. You are happy, or sad, or annoyed, or confused, etc, at this instant, not anything else. God has a certain set of rules, or another, or he doesn't even exist to begin with. The world is a certain way. The trouble is in how you figure out how the world is in difficult situations, such as the question of gods. Human knowledge is inherently non-absolute, we cant be absolutely 100% sure of anything, and most things we know don't even reach near that mark. A suitable system of thought for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and verification would take this into account. I would also contend that that knowing the truth requires evidence, observations, that anyone can see and test, because anything else is too easily made up. I'm going to cut to the chase and just say it: science. It is a system that allows easy to fool, short-lived people like us the ability to determine the most truth that we can, and the correct any mistakes once we realize they are there. Approaching the world scientifically doesn't make you a Vulcan, the sense of awe is not lost in understanding, but multiplied: a mighty oak is even more awesome when you realize that each of its trillions of cells has tens of thousands of kinesins lugging around sacs of protein more than 100 times its own mass. Well, it is for me. To wrap up, finally, I want to address this article, which is neither literalist nor scientific. I believe that it is untrue to say that we need some ill defined sense of "holiness" to make us feel human, connected to each other, and moral. I agree that there are "metaphorical truths" in the holy books, just as there are metaphorical truths in Harry Potter. The fact is, moral codes can, and are (I would argue most of the time) obtained from combining the golden rule with practical truths, augmented by an acknowledgment of our shared human quirks. Dang, I've rambled, I hope that my transitions weren't too abrupt, and I thank you in advance for reading this whole thing.