I feel like expanding on something I was moved to post in a comment thread elsewhere, to wit:

Actually, an atheist does not “simply not believe.” An atheist affirmatively believes God does not exist. This is an avowal, a profession — far more than simply a choice to “not believe.”

In most cases, especially in this country, avowed atheists are people who were raised as Christians and who therefore internalized the faith in which their lives were steeped during their impressionable years, but as a result of some negative personal experience or another they got mad at God and decided to punish Him by denying His existence — and then when He failed to go away in the face of their denial, they became militant in seeking to drive everyone else in the world to join their denial, and to marginalize all those who refused. They are Crusaders of a denied Cross, jihadists for a non-existent Allah.

Many such crusading atheists argue that because they are able to live mostly virtuous lives without belief in God, therefore belief in God is not necessary for a virtuous life. Again, they are deceiving themselves with that claim, but let’s suppose their avowal of belief in God’s non-existence were sincere rather than merely emotional camouflage. The fact remains that first-generation atheists live their relatively virtuous lives because they learned Christian values while growing up. If they succeed in abolishing religious belief from society altogether, what becomes of the second and third generations?

Author G.K. Chesterton is often quoted as having said,

When a Man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.

The American Chesterton Society declares this a misquote while acknowledging the observation itself as true. The vast majority of people do need a framework of belief upon which to build their aspirations of a virtuous life, and for most people in the world, even in the 21st century, that framework remains an all-powerful, infallible God, by whatever name.

Take that away, and people will substitute. In the old Soviet Union, the Party was god. Evidence suggests that the ascendant class in America today—regardless of poliical party—regards the State, informally of course, as god. Many have been led to their deaths by following a charismatic man—Jonestown, Waco, Heaven’s Gate…

In any such instance, the framework of belief is built on man or something he created—a cult of perfection in the imperfectible. Say what you will about the irrationality of believing in an invisible, infallible God, switching one’s belief to an example of man’s fallen nature is so far beyond unreason as to be monstrous. And if you do believe in God it is hard not to view such secular faiths as little more than open mass rebellion against Him, undertaken deliberately by some and blindly by the rest.

Faith in God is about loyalty to ideals, about judging one’s conduct against an unwavering standard. Faith in man or his doings is about loyalty to a person or a group of persons—judging one’s conduct against a standard that waves in the wind, going first this way then that. Would-be leaders prefer the latter, because it absolves them of the need to model ideals in which their followers believe.

A nation that trades ideals for approachability trades aspirations that reach to the stars for those that barely stretch across the room.
 

The truth begs nobody's pardon