Endowed with reflective consciousness, man is painfully aware of the passage of time and the finiteness of existence. He contemplates his own death. Thus man is a religious—in the broadest sense of the word—animal: he concerns himself with questions of ultimacy. He may well conclude human life is mere sound and fury. There is no God and no hereafter. But this, too, is a religious answer to a religious question.

If he adopts the non-believer’s position, one may presume he believes his religion is true and all the others false. He may even deem his god-of-Nothing sect—Nihilist? Objectivist? Obliviousist?—superior to all the others. Why the non-believer's position should prove any less divisive than any other escapes me. History's bloodiest, most fanatical theocracies—Mao’s and Stalin’s—were atheistic.

I’m the most laid-back guy on earth. It’s no skin off my nose if people embrace a Christless eternity.