Turns out, I was wrong.

"Me of Little Faith" (Riverhead: $24.95) is filled with Black's trademark rants, but they are funnier on television, delivered in brief anecdotes, than they are when combined into a 249-page book.

"So what am I, Lewis Black, stand-up comic and me of little faith, doing putting my two cents in about religion?" he asks. "Because I think it's taken too seriously and anything that takes itself too seriously is open to ridicule."

So far, so good.

But, is this ridicule or a sophomoric recital of ideas we recited when we were, well, sophomores?

"Let's face it, we're talking fear here. Fear of the unknown and fear of a known that makes no real sense without some unifying principle that allows us to sleep at night. Organized religions organize themselves around that fear. Each claims to be the one true way to get to heaven. The ultimate fear, of course, is which door is going to be the gateway to heaven? Door number one or door number two or door number three?"

Still, Black has his moments.

It's hard to disagree with his ridicule of "Jesus on a tortilla."

He writes: "When you think about it, these images have been seen — hand on the bible here — on a pancake, a cinnamon bun, and a grilled cheese sandwich. And the Jesus image on the last, incidentally, fetched its owner 28,000 bucks. He may have gone to bed hungry for a night, but it's easier to go to bed with your stomach growling when you known you're waking up to the biggest breakfast Denny's serves. There have also been sightings of Jesus on a cookie sheet, a pizza pan, inside the freezer at the local grocery, on a tree stump, and even on the shell of a turtle. And wherever these images show up, there is always someone there to believe. Somebody whose abiding faith is unshakably reinforced. In this world where technology is exploding, where we are inundated by one man-made image after the next, there's something sweet about the simplicity of a Jesus on-a-whatever."

Black claims to be a non-practicing Jew. And, though he jokes about religion, he has some pretty strong religious feelings.

For example, he is convinced that when his brother Ron died, Ron's spirit not only remained but has been setting things up for Black.

"I was at my younger brother Ron's bedside just after he passed away,'' he writes. "I stared at his ashen, lifeless body and knew that he was gone. Yet his spirit filled the room. I felt it all around me. It was so strong that I knew he was still there.

"In this moment of extreme loss, I was comforted by him, by his presence. I never expected that. I am not someone who believes in ghosts or angels. And yet at that moment I felt something completely inexplicable and unlike anything I knew or believed up to that point in my life."

Not only that, Black says, but thereafter, his career took off.

"Within a few months of Ron's death in July 1997, career doors that had been closed to me began to swing open. I have no doubt that my brother was the one who was helping to unlock them."

In other words, Black has his own beliefs, no matter what his book title implies. His book would read better if he took a little more time to think through those beliefs and share them more often with his readers.