Book excerpt: Over the last 160 years, a great dilemma has been hatching out of Western spiritual consciousness. In our modern existence, we have lost faith in the traditional routes by which human beings have come to experience the Divine, and an acceptance of oneself as having a place in the order of the universe. In Spiritual Atheism, Steve Antinoff argues that the dilemma burning within the West has been given its most fundamental expression by Kirilov in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed: "God is necessary, and so must exist . . . Yet I know that he doesn't exist, and can't exist . . . But don't you understand that a man with two such ideas cannot go on living?" According to Antinoff, spiritual atheism begins with three realizations: that our experience of ourselves and our world leaves us ultimately dissatisfied, that our dissatisfaction is intolerable and so must be broken through, and that there is no God. Continuing where such writers as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris left off, Antinoff's unique and prescient take on deity and spirituality makes this book a critical contribution to the understanding of the quest for salvation and enlightenment in a world full of chaos and need.