If religions are natural for humans and give value to their lives, why spend your life trying to persuade others to give them up?<\/p>\n
The answer that will be given is that religion is implicated in many human evils. Of course this is true. Among other things, Christianity brought with it a type of sexual repression unknown in pagan times. Other religions have their own distinctive flaws. But the fault is not with religion, any more than science is to blame for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or medicine and psychology for the refinement of techniques of torture. The fault is in the intractable human animal. Like religion at its worst, contemporary atheism feeds the fantasy that human life can be remade by a conversion experience \u201d\u201c in this case, conversion to unbelief.<\/p>\n
Evangelical atheists at the present time are missionaries for their own values. If an earlier generation promoted the racial prejudices of their time as scientific truths, ours aims to give the illusions of contemporary liberalism a similar basis in science. It\u2019s possible to envision different varieties of atheism developing \u201d\u201c atheisms more like those of Freud, which didn\u2019t replace God with a flattering image of humanity. But atheisms of this kind are unlikely to be popular. More than anything else, our unbelievers seek relief from the panic that grips them when they realise their values are rejected by much of humankind. What today\u2019s freethinkers want is freedom from doubt, and the prevailing version of atheism is well suited to give it to them.<\/p>\n