Humans have a weird bias toward the past. We don’t remember things accurately and history isn’t well studied. People often say the world is going to shit and that things were better “before.” Were they really? This is sometimes called seeing the world through rose colored glasses. Religious people seem to romanticize the past more for some reason. I think it’s because they don’t truly understand history. Not that there is anything wrong with believing in god but don’t act like the dark ages were a civilization of advancement. Don’t act like the religious crusades and other wars never happened. Don’t act like religion is all peace and love. And yeah yeah I know someone will say that the books are peaceful and it’s only human corruption that leads to these evils. But isn’t that more reason to value individualism over collectivism? The nature of religion leads to centralized power. The Protestant movement was literally an attempt to decentralize Christianity. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. It was only after Christians disobeyed the church that humanity took another step forward. Blasphemy! The printing press literally advanced humanity because it undermined religion! The greatest period of human flourishing, the gold standard, happened after the separation of church and state. Most people in the world still believe in religion so claiming that “atheism” failed assumes that the world is mostly atheist. It is not. And because no religion has objective evidence to support its claims, there can NEVER be any reconciliation or agreement amongst different religions. There will always be conflict between religions.