Religion: who needs it?

Bryan Appleyard in New Statesman

Religion, in my view, can only be properly understood as something like emotion: an innate condition of our existence and a form of our perception of the world. When its expression is denied or refused in one direction, it will simply find another. An inability to grasp this explains the deep and abiding failure of the secular imagination to grasp the dynamics of the post-cold war world in which religion has come to play such a huge part.