 There are two main types of opposition to (b*). The first is that religious utterances—including utterances of indicative sentences that are apparently literal—are not literal assertions but fall under some other standard category of speech act. Speech acts—or illocutionary acts in Austin’s (1955 [1975, 95]) terminology—are what a speaker does in saying something. Examples include assertions, questions, commands, warnings, threats, statements of intention, requests. So, according to the first type of opposition to (b*) religious utterances, while many of them appear to be literal assertions, are in fact some other kind of speech act. Proposals include analogy or metaphor  (3.1),  praise or prayer  (3.2),  and pretence or other kinds of quasi-assertion  (3.3).  The second type of opposition to (b*), considered in  (3.4),  proposes that religious sentences are used for various (non-assertoric) purposes but does not identify a unified speech act as characteristic of religious discourse.