We in the United States lucked out because we live in a republic that used religion (of the Enlightenment=Deism and some forms of Christianity variety) to give us a "less violent, more rational, more tolerant, eventually less racist, less tribal, less bigoted, less ignorance, less hostile to free inquiry, less contemptuous of women, less coercive toward children" society than most other and earlier ones -- which were also, in part, religious.

It's out of place to overplay this point: I always quote a page of Pogo on my study wall: "We have faults which we have hardly used yet." Still, in that mixed record there are many elements to affirm.

So far as the historians I have read can find, no society-wide polity founded on atheism appeared until the French Revolution and, then, the 20th century. In a choice between Revolutions, I'd take Madison-era religion-and-philosophy to Volltaire-era religion-and-philosophy as a base.

Most of the time, polities mix religion, philosophy, practical necessity, indifference, agnosticism, and somehow make it work.

The atheist regimes of the 20th century were different: They were efforts, at last, to expunge all religion and found the polity on atheism. Think of Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, for starters. (I know, we can be a bit definitionally cutesy and not entirely wrong to see Nazism, Fascism, Maoism, and Soviet Communism as bearing quasi-religoius features: ritual, myth, sacrifice, messianism, ultimate concern. But the fashioners of these did not think they were being religious and did all they could to say and show they were not.) And out of their experiments, scores and scores of millions were tortured or killed.

I think at heart the proposition about "religion is . . . " does not work because in some senses there is no such thing as "religion" because there are only "religions," and "sub-sections of religions," and they are highly diverse, made up of people who are highly diverse. Thus there are many atheists and cells of atheists who made positive human achievements, alongside agnostics and many kinds of religious folk.

I have yet to see anything positive in either the "religion is . . ." approach or my playful "atheism is . . . " approaches. Efforts by people in both camps to do in the other are wasteful of energies which could better be summoned for common good. I do not know whether or not organized atheism -- the only kind that dream of "abolishing religoin" -- will survive. It is clear that the robust growth of religious communities in Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc. is not going to be blunted or slowed because in the luxury of our book stores, salons, campuses, and parsonages we read and write books about how awful the other is.

Both atheisms and religions deserve criticism, and they are getting it. That should be all to the good.