Magical belief, whether that entails an omnipotent God who watches over us or the conviction that we can communicate with “the other side,” fills a need in us. Some of us, I should say, as atheists would be quick to counter. How seriously we take that belief, and what we do with it varies from person to person. As the debates between the godless and the faithful continue — and these are so prevalent in our culture now, the religious figure versus the atheist, sponsored by every university and cultural center, that I read such a debate in a novel I had picked up — that perhaps these two kinds of people simply have a different set of needs. It’s like a new mother arguing with a woman who has never felt maternal a day in her life. Neither side will ever truly understand the longings of the other, and the fact that they can’t stop arguing and trying to convince is proof of that.