ABSTRACT
The author exclaims that he have been an atheist since his teens, although, given early exposure first to Catholicism and then to Anglicanism, it was probably later that he shook off the feeling that a posthumous comeuppance might be awaiting for his apostasy. Atheists might argue that religious believers themselves do not separate the aspects of religion: God's wisdom is a metaphysical concept and the source of a non-negotiable set of instructions about how people should live with one another. As an atheist, the author acknowledges that the idea of God is the greatest and most terrible, idea humans have ever had. The potentially catastrophic nature of this God lies in its power to divide, as well as to unite, humans: indeed, to unite them in order to deepen their divisions. Many theists have argued that absence of empirical evidence for the existence of God, however one defines evidence, does not amount to evidence of his non-existence.
