"the historicity of our contemporary options"

 "God is still a reference point for even the most untroubled unbelievers, because he helps define the temptation you have to overcome and set aside to rise to the heights of rationality on which they dwell. . . .

     ". . . [And so,] there are serious reasons to doubt whether [this utterly Godless society] could exist. . . . [For] the interesting issue is whether there could be unbelief without any sense of some religious view which is being negated.  A condition of absence of religion which would no longer deserve the name unbelief.  If so, it would be different from our present world in one crucial respect.  Unbelief for great numbers of contemporary unbelievers, is understood as an achievement of rationality.  It cannot have this without a continuing historical awareness.  It is a condition which can't only be described in the present tense, but which also needs the perfect tense:  a condition of 'having overcome' the irrationality of belief.  It is this perfect-tensed consciousness which underlies unbelievers' use of 'disenchantment' today.  It is difficult to imagine a world in which this consciousness might have disappeared.

     ". . . in a similar way, the founding importance of the exclusive humanism of freedom, discipline, and beneficent order remains ineradicable in our present world.  Other modes of unbelief—as well as many forms of belief—understand themselves as having overcome or refuted it.  The whole Nietzschean stream is a case in point, depending as it does on seeing the filiation between Christian belief and beneficent order, and then defining itself against both."

     Charles Taylor, A secular age (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 268-269, italics mine.  This point is made again on pp. 591-592:

the very self-understanding of unbelief, that whereby it can present itself as mature, courageous, as a conquest over the temptations of childishness, dependency or lesser fortitude, requires that we remain aware of the vanquished enemy, of the obstacles which have to be climbed over, of the dangers which still await those whose brave self-reponsibility falters.  Faith has to remain a possibility, or else the self-valorizing understanding of atheism founders.  Imagining that faith might just disappear is imagining a fundamentally different form of non-faith, one quite unconnected to identity.  It would be one in which it would be as indifferent and unconnected to my sense of my ethical predicament that I have no faith, as it is today that I don't believe, for instance, in phlogiston, or natural places. . .

. . . Religion remains ineradicably on the horizon of areligion; and vice versa. . . .