  Hare did not suppose that the modern thinking man could long remain what he called a “simple believer”; so he welcomed attempts by R.B. Braithwaite and others to empty religion of dogmatic content.  He called himself a “Christian empiricist”, but thought the question whether he was really a Christian terminological.  What he retained for himself was what he once called a “blik”, an attitude to the world which somehow gave him confidence to live and think morally, trusting (as he put it) “in my own continued well-being (in some sense of that world that I may not now fully understand) if I continue to do what is right according to my lights”, as also “in the general likelihood of people like Hitler coming to a bad end” (1950/1: 38). John Hare (2002: 307) connects the inhibitions that held his father back from belief not just with modern skepticism, but with “a philosophical doctrine about meaning which he inherited from Carnap and the logical positivists”; for “He thought he could not make meaningful assertions about subjects, like God, which lay beyond the limits of possible sense experience”. Thus he denied that the transcendental has anything to do with prayer, asking “What is the difference between there being a transcendental God who listens to the prayer and directs events accordingly, and it just being the case that the events take place?”, and answering “None at all” (1973: 27). The upshot is fatal to the orthodoxies of belief as of unbelief: