Gibbous Moon wrote:
I don't think that atheism can ever be a surrogate religion or a quasi-religion. Religions, by their very nature, require an act of faith or certainty without evidence. Atheism requires no such faith and in fact requires that you are uncertain without evidence. Atheism seeks to understand the world through rational means and thinks that all phenomena are natural; religion explains the world through mysticism and recourse to the super-natural.
GM
Your summation fails to recognize that without a supreme being the government BECOMES the supreme being! The supreme entity!
Because for the government to work it has to exert control of it's citizens.
And it can't have it's citizens criticizing its laws... otherwise that government will look like it's no longer the supreme being!
And of course POWER CORRUPTS!
And men are inherently selfish.
Proof can be found by the fact that there are no current atheist governments that have comparable Christian based morals and freedoms of the governments we live under today!!
We Americans are damn tired of being thought of as dumb by the rest of the world. So we went to the polls in November and removed all doubt.