Atheism is a celebration of human inventiveness which recognises that God & religion only exist on account of 1) those human beings who made them up in the first place and 2) those who've seen fit (for whatever reason) to propagate it thereafter. There's a lot of fine things about religion - the music, the architecture, the fixtures & fittings, the scriptures &c. - which the Atheist appreciates in terms of aforementioned human inventiveness. Even I may stand before the Papyrus P52 exhibit in Manchester's Ryland's Library in a state of reverential awe, but that has nothing to do with belief in anything other than the immediate human reality & cultural history as manifest in the thing.

Atheism is an inclusive philosophy that allows for a more objective view of such matters entirely divorced from the superstition of belief, which is a quaintly folkloric delusion on the one hand, yet more than a tad provincial on the other given the diversity of human cultural / spiritual experience from which we may deduce the wellsprings & motives of organised religion, whatever the stripe. In many ways The God Concept is as much an achievement as Stonehenge, the Pyramids and the Large Hadron Collider; God is born from a dynamic Myth Process which then becomes ossified by absolutism by those for whom stasis equates with Tradition and are prepared to kill or otherwise oppress for its preservation.      

We are all of us spiritual beings; our spirituality is as unique to us as our sexuality. That Religion seeks to exploit the former in the same way as Pornography seeks to exploit the latter is but one of the misfortunes of Human Culture (along with War, The Tory Party, UKIP, EDL, the Daily Mail, etc.) which, on the evidence hitherto, must always have a Dark Side. The nature of our subjective spirituality is experienced in terms of wonder, beauty, joy, awe, our capacity for music, art, poetry, howling at the moon, weeping with joy over the birth of our children and weeping in sorrow over the death of loved ones - and pondering the Fortean in terms of what might often elude simple explanation. This much is common to all, yet unique to each of us.

Atheism presupposes that we've outgrown the need for the comfort blanket of Religion, just as Anarchy presupposes we've outgrown the need for Government. Both are optimistic glimpses of future possibility that take a very happy view indeed of human potential, however so naive that seem to the reactionary detractors for whom such enlightenment is anathema to an arrogant self-centred world view born from both pig ignorance and the fear that death might just be the end of it after all. Who knows? Who cares? Life is all that matters.