Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.

It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed (Aquinas).

We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.

The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.

God is great"). Conversations about the practical impossibility of God's existence and the science-based irrationality of an afterlife slid seamlessly into xenophobia over Muslim immigration or the practice of veiling. The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason. "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.

Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.

To not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place.