Sp what are you going to do? Admit that the critics are right? Admit that you've been making a fool of yourself? That you've done an injustice to the believers you despise, and who would relish your public humiliation? That you are a hypocrite? Not a chance.

So "Courtier's Reply!" it is. Your atheism must be touched by philistinism, deliberately closing its mind to the serious consideration, or even the reading, of the arguments of writers like Augustine and Aquinas, lest these dangerous ideas tempt one to doubt the secularist creed. Or, in the words of a better-known exercise in doublethink, "Ignorance is strength!"