The atheist movement has become politically charged in an impressive way with the entrance of Sean Faircloth. This likeable politician has tried to harness and redirect Richard Dawkins’ efforts, which began to founder, perhaps for want of tangible long-term goals other than publicly scorning the spiritual nature of mankind, and perhaps also from the backlash this habit generated.
This irritation had become such a crowd pleaser in the media that new appearances by Dawkins were no longer seen on their own merits but as a fresh opportunity to revenge all the old ones. When stores from bored journalists pointing out that the Dawkins estate was built from slave money, and gleeful headlines like Atheist Richard Dawkins Forgets Full Title of ‘On the Origin of Species’, Invokes God for Help (Urban Christian News, Feb 2012) began to appear, the rebranding must have been confirmed as the right move at the right time.
Faircloth’s conversion of the classic “bitter atheist” moniker to the newly minted “affable atheist” is a much needed step, because at heart Dawkins is a likeable mix of elaborate intellect and a surprising naiivete, genuinely hurt to find people choose their own spiritual value over molecules. The political arena now offers a potential mass distribution of his ideology but also demands simplification, trimming and focusing just as manufacturing calls for design compromises to render Heath Robinson ingenuity into a safe, sturdy and palateable reality, for the litigation-prone masses and their heedless ways.

Ingenious ideas and mass production are two completely different things (illustration: W Heath Robinson)
The bottom line in politics is that ideas, promises – and threats – need to be memorable, for a mass mind with a short attention span, and this calls for drama and simplifcation. Existentialism was always going to be a harder sell to the public than Read My Lips: No New Taxes or the playground chant of Drill, Baby Drill! That chant fell silent after the Gulf spill, will soon be back; the mass mind also has a short memory. So short that no sooner had newspapers stopped reporting on the Pacific’s sea of plastic waste – twice the the size of the American continent – people assumed it must have somehow floated off into outer space.
Faircloth’s credentials are impressive – rather than act, like many in Congress, as a well-paid pimp for the weapons boys, a floating turd in the drinking bowl of global culture - his time in American government seems to have been spent improving the lot of children – throwing out schools’ lucrative fast food mentality in an effort to reduce obesity, protecting them from abusive adults via new laws, and establishing the Maine Discovery Museum among other achievements, including winning Legislator of the Year. In short, a committed politician but also apparently an individual of principles, a man able to get things done. His vision is of a Jeffersonian America, in which church and state are separated. Interestingly, Jefferson had an affinity to Christianity, divested of illogical or superstitious claims, and to this end made his own Bible by cutting and pasting sections to create what he considered a logical narrative.

Maine Discovery Museum: kids get a lot out of these experiences. There’s nothing comparable in London as far as I know, but I took my son at age 4 to the Science Museum, which thrilled him. To the amusement of a small crowd observing a demonstration, he learned enough about aerodynamics to grasp and then run off with a brightly coloured beach ball which had hovered educationally atop a jet of air
Jefferson’s intellectual stature shows that, even to the incisive mind, Christianity has an appeal unrelated to fanciful embellishments, and to judge it solely by them shows a superficial approach to the important role religion plays in the mass mind. This approach which Dawkins has publicly sworn himself to also fails to take into account the colossal hurdles overcome in creating a system of morality and spiritual tracts that appealed to the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people over the centuries. The same problems exist now as did then in creating global movements; if anything, it should be easier today when the race has developed a more acute appetite for facts and a network of communications delivering them to millions within the day, but time honoured concepts persist, much to the frustration of those with a new and better vision.

Fighting intolerance, through, um, intolerance? “I also think humans should be treated with respect”.. Richard Dawkins in discussion with Wendy Wright. But he saw fit to publish this anyway, no doubt seeing it as a bit of fun. But it is this insensitivity which is at the heart of their image as people not in connection with the rest of humanity. Wright must have been shocked to see it, and found it confirmation of everything she previously thought true of atheists. It didn’t have to end this way..
Dawkins was exceptionally polite during an interview with Concerned Women for America’s Wendy Wright, and gave an engaging account of his position. Both grew defensive within moments: Dawkins seemed irked by her presention of the idea of a soul – something which should never form a debate for intellectual argument, as the concept itself is part of a personal worldview highly resistant to laboratory proof. He was also up-ended by her reference to science’s prejudice in preserving their own view of evolution, many points of which are still unclear, not least the origin of the whole thing. His rather uncalled for gambit was to expose her lack of scientific training as making her unsuited to comment, which gave the whole game away – since he must have known in advance who she was - and in any case would have been the worst possible thing to say to a woman defending herself. His reluctance to engage her as a person with a view to protect generated by observing the debate from the outside – the like of which there must be billions of in the world – confirmed her belief that scientists were arrogant self-admirers.
Dawkins was measured in his response, but failed to deal with her defensiveness. She made some fair points, only asking that the debate be taight rather than the theory in isolation – whatharm could there be in that? – and he could have conceded this without diminishing his belief in any way. She wanted humans to be treated with respect and dignity, but he interrupted defensively, “so do I, of course,” as if her stance somehow was an accusation. Instead, he could have said, “you’re entirely right, I’m glad we agree on something!” A subtle difference, but one not likely to be lost on a woman. Dawkins refused to accept that a jump from one species to another was a significant enough step to warrant an injection of additional information from somewhere; the micor-changes within a species do not alter its fundamental architecture, and nor can they, as this requires concurrent adjustment to vast numbers of systems.

A genuine Jeffersonian vision would need to include the dismantling of corporate ownership of the government. The presidential candidates, like brightly coloured American wrestling opponents baying for blood, while actually being close friends and part of the theatrical nature of the sport, are both offered by the same corporate sources. They are depicted as bitter rivals to engage the public’s imagination that an exciting choice is available; once elected, they soon toe the party line when the childish excitement and playground chants of the elections are forgotten. Obama, while campaigning, raised cheers by accusing Bush of planning a war with Iran. “You do not have the support of the people!” he affirmed with his measured, resolute theatricality, like David taking on Goliath. His latest plan is a war with Iran, through the intermediary of Israel, whose power in America is enshrined in America’s own statutes and protected by a vast web of corporate wealth
Evolution is clearly a fact, but the mechanism is a mystery; species can remain static for huge spans of time, and therefore require some kind of force yet undocumented to increase their complexity; even physics states that a body will remain at rest until acted on by an external force. Biology is far from at rest: the smallest components move with terrific speed and purpose, so there was plenty of room to compromise.
His self-made difficulty was understandable, but his irritation was amplified in his supporters, one of whom made a less than compassionate sketch (above), convinced that her rejection of Dawkins made her unworthy of respect. What was worse, Dawkins actually published it. While evolution itself cannot be a danger for anyone, this kind of certainty is the trigger for dangerous problems, and ironically, actually illustrates Wright’s point.
Dawkins has often said he cannot see any line that connects atheism with terrible acts, but the line is drawn not from theories but from certainty in their superiority, and the first confirmation of this is a spiteful view of others as unworthy. Compassion means seeing others as equals – you cannot have it both ways. As an illustration of this, in February I heard an atheist say that people who have had too many babies should be allowed to starve to death, along with their wretched children, to bring the population down. His friends concurred sagely. It was their own damn fault, and facts were facts. Their irritation blinkered them to the fact that allowing anyone, but especially a helpless child, to starve to death is an act of murder, diminishing one’s own humanity – whether at a distance or not.

Reasonman and his sidekick, IntolerantGit: some less than respectful views of humanity – well, enemeies of atheist reason, anyway – rather give the game away. Compassion is, at the moment, simply a political expedient ( http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/469811-richard-dawkins-tribute-art)
Maslow’s Hire Archie
The atheists attempt to sway the same mass mind which is drawn to spiritual values, and it is significant that their first step was the introduction of compassion. Compassion and humility are the primary elements in all scriptures – a fact that cannot be lost on either Dawkins or Faircloth.

Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs: certainty is second only to physical survival. But notice also how many needs are met either by spiritual discipline and the larger arc of its mass produced form, religion, and the benevolent social structures it creates. While abuses in the name of religion are as reprehensible as abuses made under the guise of parenthood or acts of mass murder under the protection of superior technology, and deserve to be stamped out, how many of these needs can be satisfied by a belief that we are lifeless machinery existing solely to propagate our randomly mutating genes?
The ten point plan for Secular America neatly sets out its stall by labelling religion’s “seductive simplicity of certainty” as an odious flaw. But certainty is a quality of the mind not tied to logic and reality – in fact logic is probably the least powerful motivation for any human with emotion, and that will include most people – and all humans gravitate to certainty, even trying to reason it into existence when facts fly in the face of it. As for simplistic, there is nothing finding a berth among the entire mass of mankind that is not, in some way, simple; simplicity is even the essence of beauty itself. We want certainty about our home, so we purchase a mortgage and pay a vast sum over the odds for the certainty of a roof over our head, despite the precarious state we inhabit, having borrowed up to the limit for the next 25 years. We want the certainty of having our one and only soulmate, despite the almost random nature of a selection from a handful, out of millions more who will never even know of our existence.
We spend two thirds of our days at a job for the certainty of solvency, knowing the fragile nature of commerce, yet spending whatever we earn so that we are never more than two paydays away from our sworn enemy, destitution; we vote for politicians who generate the greatest certainty, knowing all the while that these people are attracted only to power and have no interest in our welfare other than buttering us up just before elections (mindful of our short attention span and limited memory) for the certainty of staying in power. Beyond all these human foibles, certainty is the fundamental appeal of atheism itself: an atheist refuses to rely on faith because of its uncertain nature – he wants facts: certain facts, theories proved with certainty. Any argument with an atheist is futile if, armed with his books and facts and theories and geological samples, he is already certain that you are mistaken! In fact, how can atheists even be sure of their superior philosophy, unless they too are partaking of certainty?
Amidst the clamour to attach certainty to every conceivable surface of our life, and finding it offered at a modest fee by those who want the certainty of our money, it’s hard to believe a politician can be surprised if mankind desires certainty about its own spiritual existence: as Jefferson shows, this trait is pronounced even in the most intelligent minds. In fact this affinity to ideas of the spirit partakes of an element so massive within the mind that it can overwhelm even than the procreative urge, itself buried deep enough within the psyche that for most, abandoning it would be a biological and emotional impossibility. Those able to take risks and rise above certainty are indeed admired, but we also know that anyone who promises to replace our flawed certainty with a better one of their own is not to be taken seriously.

Jefferson Bible: his view of Christianity was based on the life, example and morality of Jesus, a sturdy component of Christianity and a fitting backdrop to a vision of America in which superstitionhad no place
The rebranded union might seem an odd alliance – a politician sensing a new tsunami to ride, and an academic known mainly for his blistering attacks on the faithful. But the whole movement is a paradox in many ways, and no element more so than Dawkins himself: a man on the one hand seeking to dismantle religion on the basis of science, and on the other dismissing all laboratory research proving neurotransmitter and cortical benefits afforded by spiritual practices; an incisive mind mustering all the intelligence it can to grapple with the complex problems of biology but writing off its ingenuity and causative layers as lifeless flukes; a Humanist denouncing the most human sentiment of all: spirituality – the sole aspect setting humanity apart from the animal world. And lastly, despite offering a scientific modus operandi as evidence of his respect for truth, Dawkins tries to strip away the one thing humans have built solely to encourage a union with the still mysterious depths of the Universe, as if he deals with beasts.
And it does seem strange to see Dawkins appear on stage to assure the crowd of natural selection’s central role after one of Faircloth’s rousing performances. Not only has NS been long discredited as a shaping force by genetic SNP research, and abandoned by those with mathematical skills, common sense, or both, but it’s a little like watching the sophisticated Segovia calmly take to the stage, after The Who have torn the place to pieces.

Star names are for sale, and apparently the Moon, too, at $45 per acre. It is only slightly less absurd that the entire Earth has also been bought up – along with all its oceans, freshwater and vegetation, despite being a resource nobody can claim to have made by their own hands, and one remaining completely out of the control of its human owners, each prepared to fight to the death over their claim.
But Faircloth is quick to praise Dawkins’ efforts, assuring the audience his place in history is guaranteed by his scientific reputation, and that he and his book, The God Delusion (available at the back) represent “a humanitarian effort for which the world will thank him for generations to come.” His appeal once again to a certainty which nobody can yet be sure about shows his political nature but also that Faircloth may not completely grasp the problem, as whatever sympathy Dawkins generates from the progeny is unlikely to be based on The God Delusion, a book so flawed even he has been seen to distance himself from in debates with intelligent Christians; it is even less likely to result from trying to tear the age-old spiritual wisdom of religion to shreds, using a kind of vitriolic loathing of faith, with the afterthought of “compassion” scribbled on a napkin and sellotaped on top, but even so, the sincerity of the tribute can’t be doubted.
Or perhaps for politicians, like those who sell stars to the wealthy, the future is a little too easy to be generous with, and has the handy quality of being available in any imaginable form and colour; anyone in need of certainty is most welcome to vast helpings of it, in exchange for relinquishing a modest claim on the present.

Sean Faircloth – Day of Reason
The rallies might be a little predictable – borrow from JFK speechcraft, paint the shadowy religious bogeymen in monstrous colours – religious childminders who leave children in their own feces, religious parents who torture their children to death, religious chemists who refuse drugs to dying sinners – all mentioned in the book Attack of the Theocrats, by the way – impressing people with the need for their time, effort and money to eliminate these dangerous non-humans. Yes, it does all sound eerily familiar, and as usual the religious character forms a generous-sized screen for projecting fears, whether you’re an ex-WWI corporal channeling the self-loathing of a country on the hard working Jewry, or an OPEC baron plotting a course for foreign oil, after the resistance of those to whom it belongs is dealt with using crushing force and monstrous savagery, to be chuckled at over celebratory press dinners. Of course, religious abuses do exist, and Faircloth’s point – that in some cases they are protected by law from being investigated, and in other cases are enshrined somehow within the law itself – must be a sound one and worthy of support. Even so, it seems a somewhat trivial goal, a matter of legislation and generating popular support, but then to a man with a hammer, every problem resembles a nail!
What is much less sound for a long-term movement is taking religion to task instead of human weakness itself: the same old sinners exist in every field of human endeavour and will not perform to order just because they’re presented with a new list of rules. Power attracts the power hungry, and power tends to corrupt. And once religion is gone, what to do about greed, moral decline, and human weakness itself, the root of the whole problem? Or would all that magically disappear with religion? To judge by the escalating cruelty of rich nations towards poorer ones, accompanied by an utterly repulsive callousness, this is a hard idea for anyone to believe. Only to someone who blames religion for all the flaws in man, must it be a foregone conclusion.
War: Terrorism with a Much Bigger Budget
An eager journalist once asked Gandhi, “well, what do you think of Western Civilisation?” to which one of the most compassionate humans ever to walk this Earth replied, “I think it would be a very good idea.” Human rights have been established and supposedly protected by every leading nation, but mentioning his own country only because it is the one he needs to galvanise, America is at the root of as much, or more, social inequality, imprisonments, executions, drug abuse, support for terror, rigged courts, rigged elections, racism, political nepotism, police brutality, widespread disillusionment, corruption, stock market greed and corporate-induced third world slavery as any other nation is or ever has been.

“Birth defects” doesn’t quite do justice to the reality of American savagery. Not content with killing women and children, they mutilated a generation yet to be born. Depleted uranium bullets, or “novel weapons” as the fawning American media describe them, were used freely. Americans gladly paid the tax dollars, the Pentagon happily took the profit, Halliburton slyly awarded themselves the rebuild contracts, and Bush’s cronies got the oil. But babies paid the price
This grotesque Frankenstein, together with its hunchbacked, fawning assistant NATO, must also be responsible for more invasions, wars, threats of dreadful mass flayings and boilings alive via nuclear weapons, birth defects (whether from Agent Orange as reported by Christopher Hitchens himself, or depleted uranium, used in Fallujah and causing a massive proportion of deformities in the months after the slaughter, and still deforming 15% of all subsequent ones years later – in a country formerly so advanced medically that it carried out the world’s second heart transplant) and sheer human misery than any other country on Earth, and certainly more military spending than the rest of the planet combined. Hatred for America is usually branded “terrorism” but it isn’t – it’s unvarnished revulsion.

Victims of “novel American weapons” in Fallujah: “..what we did in Iraq was the right thing to do. We got rid of one of the worst dictators of the 20th century.. a man who’d used weapons of mass destruction.” (Feb 17, 2010, This Week). What Chene fails to mention is that Saddam – a sadistical, bungling assassin – was supported by America, and a grinning Rumsfield even shook hands with him after his gassing of Kurdish villages, advising him to keep quiet in case even the supine American media was critical. George Bush Sr encouraged the Kurds to “rise up” against Saddam – then removed all Western support, allowing Saddam to freely massacre at least 200,000 of them. All this apart from sanctions which ex-CIA Susan Lindauer confirms killed at least one million children – the UN only bothered counting the half a million children under the age of five. When asked if half a million infants killed were a price worth paying to remove Saddam, a smiling Madeleine Albright said, “yes, I think so.”
It is into this blistering inferno that the atheists aim to prod still-maturing olive branches of intelligence and compassion, and seeing as these are the two features most lacking on the global stage, every sane person must wish them all the luck in the world.

Parent and child Fallujah victims of American invasion:
Reporting on massacres is sanitised for the American public. After their helicopter attack near the village of Djila, the US military claimed it killed 11 among “a group of men planting a roadside bomb.” Only later did they acknowledge six dead civilians, but local residents claimed many more than 11 died, and that all were farmers or their children. A disinterested media seeing foreigners as subhuman means these atrocities are seldom reported. After massacres, the military blame “bad apples” and order the media to lay low to dull the focus. This was the case with one of the worst mass murders in recent years – 16 sleeping villagers shot through the head by a disgruntled marine. He compounded the atrocity by slicing off a woman’s hand as a souvenir, and trying to burn the children’s bodies. His defenders manfully pleaded for compassion on the grounds of stress – a compassion never extended to any bereaved who want revenge. They are rebranded as “insurgents” and the solution is made simple: kill them all
Enmeshed in politics and well aware of what is practical and what is not, Faircloth is careful not to demonise the weapons business, responsible for the largest still unaccounted-for heist in all of human history, that is, $2.3 trillion stolen by the Pentagon, or the guzzling of the planet’s resources by terawatt-bulb cities and massive SUVs, or for that matter the wrecking of its ecosystems.
Some might assume all these issues would naturally sort themselves out, if only the wretched religious types were restrained by flawless secular reasoning, but that reasoning is itself as unsound as expecting the Pentagon to remorsefully hand back all the money Rumsfeld admitted they stole; such simplistic reasoning might be the only way to market a polotical group to the masses, but is certainly a bad sign in a group devoted to the power of the intellect. For example, abuses such as the experimentation on living black and Hispanic orphans by drugs companies in places such as the Incarnation Children’s Centre in New York are not pilloried in the ten point vision of secular America, because they are carried out on financial grounds, not religious ones. Perhaps this is fair enough; reason and humanism cannot be inexhaustible resources, or their political forms all-powerful. And probably at this entrenched stage, only a thorough shaking by Nature could release any privileged society’s ferocious throttling of the rest of the planet.
But in that case, perhaps the flags and disguises under which the abusers operate are not actually as relevant as the genetic decline the country as a whole finds itself in, where such abuses blossom unchecked, so that attempting to outlaw the symptoms using a piece of paper stamped with a Congressional Seal while leaving the actual causes free to fester is a futility that, contrary to the banner, fails to use any reasoning at all, on this day or any other. One may as well demand that, in order to turn things around, the orchestra sliding down the deck of the Titanic must play a secular tune instead of that hymn.

NATO’s bombing campaign in Libya left 72 civilians dead last year, a leading human rights group said Monday, accusing NATO of failing to even acknowledge the deaths.
In a 76-page report, Human Rights Watch urged NATO to provide compensation to families for the civilian deaths, injuries and loss of property. HRW’s investigation at the sites of eight NATO air strikes found that 20 women and 24 children were among the 72 people killed.
“To date, NATO has failed to acknowledge these casualties or to examine how and why they occurred,” the New York-based group said in the report.
Religion: the Oxytocin of the Masses
Pedantic criticism aside – and I realise I am overly critical by nature, but Hell is no place for timid politeness – the attempt to rebrand atheists as affable and compassionate is long overdue, as most of them are as put off as everyone else by the angry stereotype bashing and mocking the faithful, first making a stupid cartoon of their beliefs, or attaching religion to acts of destruction which they can plainly see to be political in origin. My experience of atheists generally bears out this more genial view; of course, some can be abrasive but others are warm and conscientious, human beings along the same lines as everyone – good, great, or indifferent. If they are now all about compassion, who can fault it?

A step in the right direction: oxytocin molecule
We know these newly branded emotions of compassion – gratitude, forgiveness, love of your fellow man, generosity and the like – generate oxytocin, a highly complicated neurotransmitter manufactured consistently by a relatively small (and therefore well researched) group of neurons in the supraoptic nucleus, buried deep inside the brain, above the pituitary gland. This single molecule is medically so important for every major bodily system, especially the brain, that any trend increasing its production must be a valuable contributor both to robust health and the essential hygiene of the brain. A recent clinical trial of a cholesterol inhibitor deliberately sabotaged a protein in the cholesterol production chain, but the trial had to be called off when the patients started dropping dead at double the untreated rate. The reason was probably that the same protein they sabotaged turned out to have a role in oxytocin delivery: someone might have saved tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of lives, if they had only bothered to do a little research. Oh well – they were scientists and they meant well, so that’s alright then.

19th Century manuscript of the Bhagavad Gītā (Sanskrit: भगवद्गीता, ˈbʱəɡəʋəd̪ ɡiːˈt̪aː Song of God), thought to date as early as 3000 BC. Considered so important that in an age before widespread literacy, it was committed to memory and transmitted orally by each generation. It was literally the mental cradle of later civilisations
A gift is pure when it is given from the heart to the right person at the right time and at the right place, and when we contemplate nothing in return. —The Bhagavad Gita
But apart from bodily health, the lack of oxytocin is a main factor responsible for, or possibly the result (nobody is too sure yet if its deficiency is the result of a genetic parameter, and if so, how flexible that parameter is) of human cruelty, a diluted form of which is the scorn and bitterness which atheists are understandably now trying to distance themselves from. Therefore the essence of their movement is down to neurotransmitters, which is particularly ironic, as neurotransmitter manipulation is one of the principle aims of spiritual practices.

The Gandhāran Buddhist Texts circa 100 CE (British Museum Library).. earliest version of the Dhammapada Sutta
“Generosity, or dana in Sanskrit, is a power. Traditional teachings tell us that a life of generosity forms the ideal foundation for all other spiritual growth. We nourish this power when we offer a gentle word, an open mind, or a gift of food or money. Dana flowers when we are content with things as they are, when we let go of what is not needed, and when we do not take what is not freely given to us.” [www.opendharma.org]
To this end they might also be interested in trying meditation, which thickens the cortex, and dramatically sharpens the perceptive ability of the amygdala. It also releases telomerase, which rebuilds the telomeres capping our chromosones, extending their copyable lifespan and therefore, our own. Fasting may be a staple of religions but with good reason – it boosts the signalling capacity of neurons, though nobody is yet sure exactly why, but this is why apostles fasted before making decisions. Another approach would be to visit awe-inspiring sights: architecture or sculpture intended to generate a soaring feeling of grandeur within the mind, tends to subdue the ego and accelerates the development of compassion: La Sagrada Familia and Cologne Cathedral come to mind, but the Spring Temple Buddha and Christ The Redeemer inspire the same emotions, as does the Statue of Liberty.

Aramaic extract from the Syriac Bible, circa 1216 (Bible Society, London / Bridgeman Art Library)
- Matthew 5:42 – Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
- Matthew 23:23 – Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices – mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.
- Luke 19:8 – But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”
Sights of natural beauty have a similar effect, activating wider areas of the brain simultaneously, causing the “big ideas” which occur on holiday in places of scenic beauty. Reason dictates that if you need humanistic values, you need to consider the brain: methods to extend the various axes of our flexible brain capacity on which we hang the fabric of our personality, must surely be welcomed by atheists seeking to increase the compassionate value of their brand.

Would an atheist go to a religious building to help develop compassion? Probably not. To appreciate the soaring architecture inspired by religious sentiment, then? Certainly
One last idea won’t be of interest, but is nonetheless useful to know – trying to formulate one’s own idea of divinity, and attempting to keep it in mind during the scrum of life seems to expand mental calm, intuition, and perhaps by a strange form of osmosis, the gradual development of altrusitic traits within one’s own personality – all the well-known icons of divinity in human form enconpass altruism.
Mocked though they were by atheists before the rebranding, these icons nevertheless serve an essential purpose – planting an appealing ideal of mental perfection, subject to the varying capacity of every brain, drawing it by fits and starts to that evolutionary end. This process is as certain as an anxious accountant drawn by his constant focus on the bottom line to ever more miserly acts, because of a law of the brain: like it or not, the mind becomes a mirror of whatever concepts it habitually dwells on, and though subject to upheavals and abuses like all harnesses to power, religion has formed a handy bulwark against despair and amorality over the centuries.

One of the original (Noble version) texts of the Qur’an
Whenever Prophet Muhammad met a miserly person, he advised him to be more generous and charitable. Ibn `Abbas said that he heard Prophet Muhammad say, “The believer is not the one who eats when his neighbour beside him is hungry,” another companion heard the Prophet say, “The believer is simple and generous, but the wicked person is deceitful and ignoble.”
Shorn of lofty ideals, shorn of benevolent neurotransnmitters, the brain quickly falls prey to materialism, cynicism, selfishness, suspicion and hatred, and the 20th century is as good an example of this as we are ever likely to see, except perhaps for the 21st century. An added benefit of developing positive characteristics is the increased expectation of these same traits in others – seen as equal members of the same universal consciousness – all of which adds, however gradually or imperfectly, to one’s optimistic social outlook, improving society a little, however slightly. But that’s enough religious proposals – let’s not push our luck!
So, while compassionate atheists should be welcomed all over the world, the same welcome must be extended to any school of thought fostering such compassion – since compassion is compassion whether expressed by an atheist or the Mujahedin. Such schools of thought would include those based on mankind’s scriptures, all of which – without exception, and regardless of abuses committed by those seduced away from them by politics and greed – emphasise the importance of cultivating that most important and highly regarded of all human qualities.

An atheist religion – who knows? It just might catch on!