Atheists pride themselves on their rationality. Most claim that God has been debunked by science and, in particular, by Darwin's theory of evolution. There is no need for a creator, they say, mankind was not created, humanity simply emerged from the slime by the process of natural selection among random variants of earlier life forms.
And if you ask these rationalists where the primeval slime came from they tell you it arose through the chemical and physical processes that in the course of billions of years shaped the earth, its climate and oceans.
And if you ask them where the earth came from they tell you it arose through evolutionary processes in the galaxy, involving star formation and supernova explosions and stellar nucleosynthesis and other events occurring over the 14 billion years since the birth of the universe in the Big Bang.
And if you ask them who set off the Big Bang, they tell you it was the result of a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum.
And if you ask them who created the vacuum and who wrote the rules that caused this Mother-of-All quantum fluctuations to occur in said vacuum they tell you, um, well, we've not yet worked that out, but obviously it wasn't a being in the form of a man with a gray beard, who set the thing going solely for the purpose of creating Planet Earth and its residents amazingly evolved in the image of the Creator.
So the atheist boasting of their scientific rationality and their evolutionism can tell you nothing whatever about the ultimate origins of the World or, therefore, of humanity. Or as Stephen Hawking wrote in a moment of candor about the physicists' Holy Grail, "the theory of everything," we don't know what it is "that breathes fire into the equations" or why "the universe goes to all the bother of existing."
Which means that for all their scientism, the atheists have no more idea than anyone else about why the universe, or hence humanity, exists. In reality, therefore, the position of the atheists is simply this: they reject as meaningless and worthless rubbish the Bible, the Koran and the Gitas and other Holy writings of the World's religious faiths because they are not founded on science, which as we've just established, has nothing to say about the creation of the world.
But there's no reason for intellectual conceit in rejecting the truth of the Holy books. Obviously, as a literal account of the origin of the World, Genesis is bunk. Equally, as the portrait of an omniscient and benevolent creator, the Old Testament fails totally. On any objective reading of the Bible, Yahweh is a vain, ignorant, sadistic racist. But so what? Who's claiming the Bible represents historical truth, or the morality of America's new religion of Political Correctness? Well some ignorant people exploited by television evangelists may believe the former, and some crackpot liberal Christians, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, may try to believe the latter. But any half educated person or reasonable intelligence knows that Holy scripture is neither history nor an old fashioned version of political correctness. Rather, it is a collection of myths, rules of conduct, songs, poetry and words of wisdom that promote group survival and facilitate collaboration among strangers within a faith community. The great religions embody the codes of conduct that created the moral framework within which the World's great civilizations have survived over the course of the last several thousand years.
But atheists, apparently, cannot tolerate the telling of myths, or they hate moral rules, or they have no ear for poetry, or they loath to hear words of wisdom from a former time. More seriously, they fail to grasp, or they seek to deny, that religious narratives are neither historical nor scientific, but simply part of a vital mechanism of social organization. Anti-religious atheism is thus based on the failure to understand two fundamental features of human society; namely, the universality of religious belief, and the necessity of religion as the basis of a society-wide ethical code upon which the prosperity and the survival of a human community depends.
The universality of religion arises from the human propensity to endow moral rules with great emotional significance. This propensity is undoubtedly the result of Darwinian selection. Groups unable to uphold a system of moral rules were wiped out by better adapted groups, which is to say groups more susceptible to religious faith. By exploiting the human susceptibility to religious faith and the moral rules that religion embodies, the institutions of religion imbue all members of a society with the same moral values. It is the sharing of a moral code that ensures social cohesion and provides a basis for collaboration among strangers, rather than merely among immediate relatives and acquaintances as in the pre-civilizational mode of human existence. The importance of myths, music, poetry, prayer, fasting, etc. is that they add to the emotional significance of the moral code that the faith imbues.
In their contribution to the well-being of society, not all religions are equal. Many have failed, their adherents destroyed or converted to other faiths by groups with better religious institutions. Moreover, there is nothing universal about the myths and rituals of religion. God is not necessary to religion as the Communists demonstrated following the Russian revolution. Instead, as in Ancient Rome, people may be expected to worship an all powerful human ruler, a Caligula, a Stalin, or an Obama. In general, however, godless religions serve their adherents poorly. Rome under the divine-emperors became decadent and fell to the barbarians; Communism became decadent and fell to the Americans; and today, the American empire and its vassal states, which in accordance with the godless and supposedly rational religion of Political Correctness are committed to the destruction of their own peoples and cultures through the suppression of reproduction of the native population, the mass killing of the unborn, combined with the promotion of immigration of more fertile aliens of a different race and religion, are both decadent and apparently on the brink of implosion.
So, of course, God, as portrayed in Holy scripture of this or that religious faith, does not exist. But the myth of God the lawgiver still exists for the majority of the World’s population. Moreover it will be those of the more robust, god-fearing religious faiths who will inherit the earth, not the damn fool atheists and their brainwashed politically correct followers who take pride in destroying the religious faith of their own community.
