Feverishly heaping indictments against the Almighty from Scripture after Scripture, Atheism stumbles onto Divine Parascenium backstage where only cosmic radiation, hissing endlessly into fathomless void, awaits. Luckily, the Buddha, wielding Vedantic cosmology as a powerful torch, already long ago discovered that path to its destination; so Atheism does stand firmly on solid ground. "God or no God," she proclaims, "we should act as though there were One."

Atheism always thought merely striking the blinders of ignorance and delusion from people's eyes would suffice. She little understood, at first, how all the world's faiths already struggle to do this; how the Dharmic traditions, in particular, make taming the ego's delusions their whole raison d'ętre: with infinite patience, compassion and subtlety of thought. See the world with fresh eyes and be not deceived!

Mainstream Christians already know this inevitable refuge; no responsible, eminent Christian today actually believes the Earth cobbled together in some breakneck six-day (or even 6000-year) process by indifferent Celestial workmanship - not even bothering to put lights up in the workshop until the project's third day. The real God, the God of Reality, focused truly unimaginably vast reserves of pure energy on a single point in a void, about 14 billion years ago - and let it go.

For hundreds of thousands of years, this plasmic energy field was so hot and dense, not even a photon of light could escape to illuminate chaos. Now, in ten or a hundred thousand years or sooner, this Creation story as well may be relegated to the status of mere mythos in light of new knowledge; but in the meantime, it serves to shine at least a feeble beam into the past and possible future of a God truly effectively Immortal and Powerful beyond all understanding: a God who thinks nothing of planting a seed and waiting tens of billions of years for it to bear fruit.

What are we then, really? In the first place, we are descendants of a single-celled bacteria. Retch - or titter nervously - it is true; seen from space, life on Earth might resemble more than anything else a massive colony of simple cells still. Bacteria and humanity contrasted ought inspire even greater wonder and awe, than any breath of life puffing into Divinity's Personally-Fashioned clay golems. Thank Science for helping us understand exactly what we really worship God for, that we needn't rely solely on late-Bronze or early-Iron Age dreams, hallucinations, allegories, prejudices and myths to inform us.

The original bacteria bobbed happily and reproduced themselves in the oceans for 2 billion years, before finally one cell enveloped another, thus acquiring a nucleus. After another billion-plus years, the superior fitness of nucleated cells won out and ever increasingly complex life forms developed – until 900 million years later, the genus Homo emerged. These descended-of-germ-cells apes, soon to lose most of their hair, clung desperately to an insanely whirling, revolving, rocketing dust mote traversing hundreds of miles per second in multiple directions simultaneously: these affecting little apes seem also the first of their kind with wit to inquire after the Causes of things - as the galaxy they inhabit screams along at 4/3 million miles per hour relative to its neighbor galaxies.

For those who quibble about evolution and whence came life out of dead matter, Atheism declares all Creation evolved - and is evolving yet. Every new generation of stars begins with ever-greater densities of heavy metals forged in the violent death throes of older, more massive stars: giving successive planetary systems richer and richer palettes of complex materials to combine and recombine. Life may very well be but an inevitable outcome of material evolution condensing complexity out of energy across billions of years. And if any would call this shortchanging God's glory, Atheism rejoins that God's glory can only finally, really shine forth to full effect when clothed in absolute Truth and Candor.

Atheism descends to a stage whisper: "Lo, I will show you an inner secret of what you really, really are, then. The first particles that condensed out of that original super-hot plasma - little more than perturbations on an electro-magnetic field - eventually found one another and bonded into slightly more complex particles that continued bonding, until stable atoms began forming. These infinitesimally tiny atoms, with their electron shells concealing even many-orders-of-magnitude-smaller nuclei, are the basic building blocks of all matter.

"Each of these atoms comprises a billionth of 1% bound energy and 99.999999999% empty space; this is the Vacancy your non-Abrahamic Asian forebears promised you: you are borrowed energy dancing on a Void.

"And for anyone who thinks God has not given gifts richly, consider that you contain millions of dollars worth of electrical potential in the octillions of atoms in your bodies. Every single one of you. The Earth itself is a vast sink of incalculably valuable potential energy. And that's just one planet in an observable universe boasting over a trillion galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars capable of inspiring planets - hundreds of billions times a trillion stars under God's jurisdiction."

Now we're just barely clearing our throats to start really talking about the Glory of God.

Even an elementary school child at a Bible study in a musty, neglected classroom in the basement of a magnificent old stone church, after hearing the Tower of Babel story for the very first time, might wander through dark stone-lined passages afterward and suddenly emerge into the resplendant grandeur of a perfect spring day (ancient tree auras reaching everywhere into light) to conclude that the Tower of Babel story's a load of loose and aggressively noxious bullshit: false on its very face and profoundly insulting to Divine Reputation. Not just that some dusty proto-architects piling up clay bricks might have given Omnipotent Omniscience "cause for concern" about the future somehow, but that God is depicted as having come down because of it and confused all the languages of the Earth: making things vexingly more difficult and dangerous for everyone, down to this very day.

It's a just-so story that is just not so; and neither just to the Wisdom - nor the Love - of God. Would the God of hundreds of billions times a trillion stars really come barging into some little planet somewhere like a mean-drunk father: aching to knock over a child's carefully-arranged blocks and accuse him of some obscure Celestial building code violation, punishing by forbidding him to ever again speak with any of his brothers or sisters? "Who, then, doth more wrong than one who utters a lie concerning God, and rejects the Truth when it comes to him?" the Holy Ku'ran enquires.[3]

Atheism is not a religion; though it is a faith; Science circumscribes just the same secular society modern polities already understand and function within. Atheism needs no dogmas, no rituals, no priests. Every soul's business with God is its own, after all; Jesus told us to pray in our closets, and Atheism has heard Him. "Whether the dogma obtain, Malunkyaputta, that the world is eternal, or that the world is not eternal, there still remain birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair, for the extinction of which in the present life I am prescribing," the Buddha declared.[4]

Atheism's heart aches with the burdens of innumerable little godlets delighting in blood sacrifice, egging credulous nations on to foul genocide, high-fiving those openly gloating about lounging in houses they hadn't built and drinking from wells they hadn't dug. Who justifies these barbarisms, now? Faith traditions evolve and develop as the faithful gain new understandings of Scripture and God. Else whence came itself Christianity?