The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention--distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence--is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity--a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.