Belief, Then and Now - NYTimes.com Re "The Gospel According to "Me" " (Sunday Review, June 30): The moral dilemma addressed by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster is the same problem William James struggled with more than a hundred years ago, when he saw that belief in God, or in anything unseen and scientifically unprovable, was considered by educated people to be superstition. He was despondent about the moral consequences of that belief. Spiritualism and materialism, he wrote, "make different prophecies of the world's future"; "spiritualistic faith in all its forms deals with a world of promise, while materialism's sun sets in a sea of disappointment." Belief in "the Absolute" - in whatever form - "grants no moral holidays," he said, but instead energizes us to think beyond our own satisfactions, to vote, as he once put it, for the kind of world we want to inhabit. Unlike Mr. Critchley and Mr. Webster, James believed that spiritual alternatives to the Judeo-Christian tradition need not be weak, and need not lead to what the writers call "a liturgy of inwardness." LINDA SIMON Oakland, Calif., July 1, 2013 The writer, professor emerita of English at Skidmore College, is the author of "Genuine Reality: A Life of William James."