But Mr de Blasio's story is also more effective today because it is a better description of reality.
None of these traditions capture the one true description of reality or have a direct "hookup with the divine".
The physical description of reality provided by contemporary science is one of stunning beauty and powerful utility.
Space-time, in other words, may be a translation of some other description of reality that, though more abstract or unfamiliar, can have greater explanatory power.
"It cannot achieve empirically verifiable surprises that force scientists to make substantial revisions in their basic description of reality," he writes.
That witti cism may soon be a somber description of reality if the cost of campaigning for political office in this country continues to spiral out of control.
If he had been giving a university lecture on religious sociology, such a statement might have been accepted as an accurate description of reality.
Since naturalistic philosophers take science seriously as the best description of reality, they accept the responsibility of making sense of quantum physics.
"The facile assertion that the United States cannot 'go it alone' is more a hopeful platitude than a description of reality," he writes.
This litany of alarm has a dismal record as a description of reality, and yet has not changed much over the past century.
Modern art here was simply a description of reality – skyscrapers were already starting to soar when Marcel Duchamp arrived in New York.
