 First, Georges Rey has defended a position that he calls meta-atheism according to which practitioners of religion exhibit widespread self-deception about what they say (2006: 337). For anyone with a basic education in science, Rey contends, it is obvious that religious claims are false. Rey is not proposing, however, that educated speakers are insincere when they affirm religious claims since they may think of themselves as believing what they are saying (2006: 338). Instead, speakers are in a state of self-deception. While they may recognise on a more critical level that religious claims are false, they do not entertain this when engaging in religious discourse. Why do religious people do not recognise and consciously draw out the implications of their disbelief? Rey suggests a number of reasons: loyalty to family and other social groups, personal ties and identifications with religious institutions, resistance to changing one’s public stance, the wish for one’s life to be part of a larger project. Rey supplements his arguments by pointing up differences between religious and scientific judgements aimed at showing that the latter are “understood to be fictional from the start” (2006: 345). Now, Rey’s position is, to say the least, contentious—for starters, his contention that religious claims are obviously false seems unsupportable (see Scott 2015 for a more detailed critique). However, with some assumptions about self-deception, we can understand meta-atheism as a kind of hermeneutic religious fictionalism. Speakers are in a conflicted state of self-deception that falls short of belief: on some level or in some uncritical contexts speakers treat religious claims as if they were true, while also believing in critical and reflective contexts that they are false. Accordingly, in uttering religious sentences speakers engage in quasi-assertion whereby they accept what is said without genuinely believing it to be true.