While many of my major intellectual influences are in fact atheists of the old school materialist tradition who analyzed religion as a cultural force determined by economics and social relations, I was always critical of the obsessive view of atheism an an innately liberating belief system that superseded the material conditions that we all live in and that shape our lives. The New Atheists, and [Sam] Harris in particular, spent a lot of time obsessing over the problem that people believe "bad things" even as they ignored the real-world forces that might generate those bad beliefs, and in turn, adopted much of the reactionary worldview of their Christian counterparts in the Bush administration.