Sidney Hook on religion

I didn't have space to include this in the article immediately below on Richard Dawkins's critique of religion, so I'm posting it here.

The late Sidney Hook, pragmatist philosopher and scholar of Marx, is one of my intellectual and political heroes. He was a notable champion of secular humanism. In an essay entitled "Religion and the Intellectuals", published in Partisan Review in 1950, he wrote what to me is a wise and even definitive comment on religious faith. The essay is included in his book The Quest for Being (1961), and this passage is on p. 100:

So long as religion is freed from authoritarian institutional forms, and conceived in personal terms, so long as overbeliefs are a source of innocent joy, a way of overcoming cosmic loneliness, a discipline of living with pain and evil, otherwise unendurable and irremediable, so long as what functions as a vital illusion or poetic myth is not represented as public truth to whose existence the once-born are blind, so long as religion does not paralyze the desire and the will to struggle against unnecessary cruelties of experience, it seems to me to fall in an area of choice in which rational criticism may be suspended. In this sense, a man's personal religion justifies itself to him in the way his love does. Why should he want to make a public cult of it? And why should we want him to prove that the object of his love is the most lovely creature in the world? Nonetheless it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

That is my view.