Atheism is just another secular religion. Unlike the radical politics, it has no Utopian aspects to it. There have been some atheists who preached about how the end of religion, by which they mean Christianity, will make the world a better place, but they always seemed to get tripped up by their hatred of Christianity. That’s the peculiar aspect to atheism. Other religions seek to crowd out the all other religions, but atheists just have it in for Christianity. Anyway, it is good to see I’m not alone in this view.

If an autobiography can ever contain a true reflection of the author, it is nearly always found in a throwaway sentence. When the world’s most celebrated atheist writes of the discovery of evolution, Richard Dawkins unwittingly reveals his sense of his mission in the world. Toward the end of An Appetite for Wonder, the first installment in what is meant to be a two-volume memoir, Dawkins cites the opening lines of the first chapter of the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976:

Intelligent life on a planet comes of an age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is: “Have they discovered evolution yet?” Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

Several of the traits that Dawkins displays in his campaign against religion are on show here. There is his equation of superiority with cleverness: the visiting aliens are more advanced creatures than humans because they are smarter and know more than humans do. The theory of evolution by natural selection is treated not as a fallible theory—the best account we have so far of how life emerged and developed—but as an unalterable truth, which has been revealed to a single individual of transcendent genius. There cannot be much doubt that Dawkins sees himself as a Darwin-like figure, propagating the revelation that came to the Victorian naturalist.

Note how the author ties evolution into the cult like aspects of atheism. The Darwin Fish people are a lot like liberals in that they love science as long at it is a weapon against their enemies. Atheists tend to get light headed when you explain the evolutionary importance of religion and modern humans. They start fainting when you explain the importance of teleology and Christianity to the growth of science.

It is a different matter when those he sees as his intellectual underlings—religious believers and any who stray from the strictest interpretation of Darwinism—refuse to follow his lead. Recalling his years at boarding school, Dawkins winces at the memory of the bullying suffered by a sensitive boy, “a precociously brilliant scholar” who was reduced to “a state of whimpering, abject horror” when he was stripped of his clothing and forced to take cold baths. Today, Dawkins is baffled by the fact that he didn’t feel sympathy for the boy. “I don’t recall feeling even secret pity for the victim of the bullying,” he writes. Dawkins’s bafflement at his lack of empathy suggests a deficiency in self-knowledge. As anyone who reads his sermons against religion can attest, his attitude towards believers is one of bullying and contempt reminiscent of the attitude of some of the more obtuse colonial missionaries towards those they aimed to convert.

You see this with atheists. Their new religion is always a tantrum against their old religion. Penn Jillette never shuts up about his atheism. On many occasions he has talked about how it arises from having watched his mother suffer at the end of her life. His answer was that no God could let people suffer like that so there must be no God. His atheism is therefore a mix of narcissism, ignorance and self-pity. Despite the self-absorption, atheists don’t seem to know themselves very well. Maybe that’s why they declare themselves a God.