"Appearances can be deceiving"... Many atheists, that is, those who argue against the existence of God, as well as agnostics, those who do not even argue, have in practice, simply replaced the "Christian" God for a myriad of little gods, to whom they knowingly or unknowingly worship.
Natural perception of the divine
From birth, children perceive the world around them as "a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste" (Deuteronomy 32:10). They are scared of everything and everyone, therefore they need to cling to something or someone they can trust and when they find them, they smile, hold out their hands and develop a relationship.
Phylogenesis repeats or recapitulates ontogenesis: in other words, in the development and evolution of a baby until maturity, we see the evolution and development of primitive man to the present day repeated or recapitulated. The extreme experience of loneliness and insecurity, that the baby notices, is identical to what the primitive man felt. Faced with a world he neither knew nor could control, he too sought the protection of a superior being, anthropologically defined as “tremendum ed facinans”"awesome and fascinating".
At all times and places, ever since he became aware of himself, modern man has always been religious, that is, he always understood that the ultimate meaning and reason of his existence and life were outside of himself, transcending him, and therefore he sought to reconnect and create links with this superior and transcendent being.
Atheism or emancipation?
Atheism only emerged when man gained a certain confidence in himself, after science and technology provided him with better means of sustenance and greater knowledge and control of the forces of nature.
It is therefore no coincidence that atheism only arose where science and technology were most developed, in the West; and it is also no coincidence that atheists are usually people who have some financial, social, political or intellectual power to which, ironically, they cling to religiously.
What seems like atheism at the time is perhaps emancipation; while man felt insecure and unprotected, in relation to the world around him, he sought the love of God as his Father; with the development of science and technology, man not only gained a certain control over the world around him, but also a greater confidence in himself, to the point where he could say what those who built the Titanic said before its maiden voyage, "Not even God can sink it"...
Feeling that he has come of age, that he no longer needed a Father God, and just as it happens in Freudian psychology: the child in his process of emancipation antagonizes his father; Nietzsche even declared God dead to welcome the coming of age of man, what he called the superman. But God did not disappear to the many who hate him, nor did he die to those who declare him dead.
The Christian God is dead, long live the ancient gods of Olympus
Having abandoned the relationship with the transcendent God that made him free, modern man soon began to deify or idolize immanent domestic realities with which he has reconnected.
Thus, most of those who declare themselves atheists are actually polytheists, that is, they deny the true God in their lives in order to submit to human and worldly realities to which they devote or misspend a great deal of their time and energy. It is rare to find atheists who do not establish “religious” ties and bonds with these realities.
Consciously or unconsciously, today’s man has recreated the ancient gods of Olympus. For the Romans, as for the Greeks, each reality was governed or tutored by a god: Venus or Aphrodite, the goddess of love; Bacchus or Dionysus, the god of pleasure; Chronos, the god of time; Neptune or Poseidon, the god of sea etc... Jupiter or Zeus, the chief of the gods.
In ancient Olympus, there were no gods for realities such as peace, fraternity, love (understood as service to others), generosity, mercy, and justice. These are both human values and attributes of God. There were only gods for material and worldly realities that reflected the nature of the fallen man.
The Bible warns against the temptation to give the value of “God” to worldly realities, absolutizing or idolizing them; you cannot serve both God and money (Luke 16:13); you cannot serve power, pleasure, fame, youth, physical beauty, science, technology and so many other realities.
"Loving God above all things" (Deuteronomy 6:5) means relativizing all things, absolutizing God alone and cultivating human values that ultimately are themselves attributes or definitions of God. By denying the existence of God, whom we must love above all else, modern man’s love, relationship or reconnection falls on all things, thus transforming modern man into a polytheist, divided, worldly and materialistic.
Nature abhors emptiness
"When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting place, but not finding any, it says, 'I will return to my house from which I came.' When it comes, it finds it swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the last state of that person is worse than the first." Luke 11:24-26
Both theists and atheists can fall prey to the temptation of idolatry; however, the latter are more exposed than the former; on one hand, because they are closed to the transcendence and are at the mercy of immanence, living in pure worldliness; on the other hand, because they try to create a vacuum within themselves in an almost artificial way, and nature, and also human nature, has a horror of emptiness.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC