BY DANIEL JUPP

If we are going to judge a way of looking at the world solely by its worst adherents, then we should also remember that the only self-declared atheist nations in history have been the communist dictatorships. Lenin said that atheism was fundamental to communism. Stalin and others outlawed and persecuted the Russian Orthodox Church. The Chinese communists have persecuted Christians and other faiths.

So is atheism responsible for the live organ harvesting of China? Is atheism responsible for the 100 million murders by communist regimes? Should we remember that atheist nations starved, beat, whipped, suffocated, tortured and executed millions of people?

I used to be a fairly militant atheist. I’m still an atheist and find it impossible to believe in a benign Creator in a flawed universe. But I’ve grown up enough to see how much good we lost when we abandoned Christianity, and how many grim things have flourished since.

People will believe in something, anything, rather than nothing.

Nothing only offers despair.

So in your Nothing Society along come more injust belief systems, many times more oppressive than your jettisoned Christianity. In your Nothing Society along come drug addiction and suicide, crime and decadence. In your Nothing Society along come new creeds, cults and irrational belief systems – like the green eco-apocalypse cult of doomscultists or the woke leftist-progressive cult and the trans-reject-all-biology-and-sense cult.

There is never really a choice so simple and morally obvious as a choice between religious fundamentalism on the one hand and atheist rationalism on the other hand. There are Christian rationalists and there are atheist fundamentalists. There are people whose professed love of Reason or Science leads to the wildest of irrational, unscientific and illogical actions, as we saw with parts of the Covidian Cult.

The Nothing Society is a terrible error that fundamentally ignores human nature.

We must believe, and we will believe. Atheism itself becomes a belief system, or ushers in another. The old cliche is that there are no atheists in the trenches. But all the world and all its struggles and all its joy and disappointments are ‘the trenches’.

We are in the mud and staring at Death – all of us – no matter how comfortable we may be. And we know it.

We know it in our bones and blood and therefore must believe Something.

Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex.