The Church of No God

How Online Atheists Became the Thing They Hate: Stupid Assholes

DISCLAIMER: This article was written with AI programs Co-Pilot & ChatGPT with my sassy tweets providing the prompts.

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In the grand amphitheater of online discourse, one group stands proud, clad in impenetrable smugness and armed with a well-worn copy of The God Delusion—yes, the noble and enlightened atheist brigade. These digital crusaders roam the internet in search of ignorance to vanquish, pausing only to remind believers that, actually, their sky daddy isn’t real and that they themselves are paragons of pure reason, untainted by such primitive delusions as faith.

Nothing brings an atheist more joy than declaring that all religious thought is simplistic while simultaneously reducing every theological discussion to "imaginary friend" rhetoric. After all, why respond to centuries of nuanced philosophical discourse in kind when a sweaty 4CHAN meme will suffice?

So let’s just rip the obvious band-aid off: Atheism is not a religion, per se. The irony, of course, is that online atheists share an uncanny trait with their fundamentalist counterparts: an unwavering certainty that they have grasped the ultimate truth. And what better way to showcase their own superior intellect than by posting condescending tweets that dismiss dissenting opinions with the same level of nuance as a carnival barker on crack.

Atheists love to throw around the phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," yet they never stop to consider you can’t prove something that hasn't been definitively defined in a testable way. Nevertheless, their entire argument for disbelief (meditate on that for a second) hinges on the assumption that only empirical evidence matters. But that’s not a scientific claim—it’s a philosophical stance known as scientism. And like all philosophical stances, it isn’t provable through experiment. Ironically, the very foundation of their skepticism is built on an unprovable belief system of its own. Exactly like their smug reductionist take, "religion started when the first con man met the first sucker,” an easy, cynical story that lets them dismiss thousands of years of human spiritual development as nothing more than a long con.

But the reality is far more interesting—and far more threatening to their worldview [SIC]. Religion didn’t emerge because some prehistoric grifter realized he could charge admission to the first Church of the Cave Spirit. It arose because early humans, in their attempts to make sense of existence, recognized something deeply profound: the universe isn’t out there—it is us; we are the universe looking back at itself.

From this realization, ancient humans saw themselves as both a part of the cosmos and distinct from it, capable of reflection, imagination, and transcendence. In other words, they were staring at the very foundation of what we now call "God"—not an old man in the clouds, but the inherent unity between mind and matter, the subjective and the objective, the perceiver and the perceived. Over time, this understanding fragmented, became externalized, anthropomorphized, institutionalized, and sometimes corrupted. But at its core, religion was never just a scam—it was humanity’s first attempt to articulate the ineffable.

And here’s where it gets fun: atheists, in their quest to reject this ancient insight, often stumble back into it through the side door. They talk about the "majesty of the cosmos," the "awe of existence," the "interconnectedness of all things"—unwittingly echoing the very spiritual truths they claim to reject. In their desperation to kill God, they keep resurrecting Him under new names.

Now they could lean into this, embrace it, but rather than creating a better religion—one that accounts for modern knowledge, avoids the dogmatic pitfalls of the past, and harnesses the unifying power of belief—they just sit on the sidelines, too smug to compete, ceding one of humanity’s most powerful organizing forces to the worst possible actors.

The truth is, religion isn’t just about belief in the supernatural. It’s about ritual, myth, community, and shared purpose. Strong communities are bound by shared narratives and symbols, whether explicitly religious or not. The most successful political movements, social justice causes, and even fandoms mimic religious structures—sacred texts, heretics, moral codes, and in-group rituals. Atheists love to roll their eyes at “organized religion,” but then they turn around and devote themselves to ideologies that function almost identically—minus the self-awareness.

If they actually engaged with religion beyond dismissing it, they might realize it’s not just an opiate for the masses—it’s a framework for meaning, cohesion, and action. And if they don’t take up the mantle, someone else will. And is.

“A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.”— Francis Bacon, science guy