Instead of just criticising established religion, humanists and atheists should create more rational alternatives

LINK to Guardian article, Hey, preacher – leave those kids alone, by Ariane Sherine

What humanists and atheists really need to do, is stop criticizing established religions, which obviously play a very important role (private, social, economic and/or political) in many people's lives, develop an understanding of why and then set about establishing more enlightened and rational alternatives, which we are urgently in need of.

RELIGION derives form the Latin, religare, meaning to bind together, and nothing is more important for a society than that, for its members to be bound together, not in all details, but by a shared fundamental view of that same society, the basic values it stands for, and a sense of identity with and commitment to it.

This is precisely what is so sorely lacking in modern Western society, with its pathological "individualism", where state and established religion no longer fulfill this function.

Not that I want them to reassert themselves. On the contrary, I want us to recognise their perverted Darwinian nature, which accounts for their total inadequacy and the social, political, economic and environmental mess they have got us into, and the global catastrophe they leading us towards.

But we cannot just do away with them. We need to reinvent them, in the light of a humane interpretation of our Darwinian nature and the kind of society we want to create.

At the moment, unfortunately, most humanists and atheists (and academics in general, including even the evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, because of their dependency on the state and the socioeconomic status quo) are as reluctant to take a human-evolutionary, i.e. Darwinian, view of society and their own role in it as those attached to and dependent on established religion.