Phillips...

Phillips, like Strauss, is also more concerned with the task of understanding religious texts, texts that offer theological or philosophical discussions of religious beliefs, and other religious phenomena, rather than with the task of understanding from a religious point of view.

The religious point of view is explored in Westphal's study of the hermeneutics of suspicion.[^7] Westphal's aim is to show how religious thinkers might benefit from the insights of atheists without accepting the atheism on which their thought is based.

He uses religious language to reinterpret Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, not as they intended to be understood, but as exposing how religion can be falsified when used to satisfy projections of our own needs, or to placate those who are exploited, or to allow the weak willed to feel self-righteous. In calling Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche the great secular theologians of original sin I have suggested that the hermeneutics of suspicion belongs to our understanding of human sinfulness.

The self- deceptions they seek to expose, like those exposed by Jesus and the prophets, are sins and signs of our fallenness.[^8] Westphal's work suggests how a hermeneutic of suspicion may be transformed into a religious hermeneutics. The hermeneutics of suspicion operates by observing that the reasons that inform the self-understanding of religious agents may be rationalizations that serve to hide baser motives.

Here we find a clear example of an apparently religious phenomenon, prayer, that hides a non-religious motive, showing off.