Here’s another way of putting a point I made in my last entry: we understand things by seeing them in a setting. We also need to have some sort of general understanding of the world at large to orient our lives and thought as a whole. That understanding can’t involve an infinite series of ever more comprehensive settings. We must therefore recognize some sort of super-setting within which we place all other things. In order to function as such that super-setting must have the general properties traditionally associated with God—self-sufficiency, transcendence of all other considerations, explanatory power with respect to all things. So everybody who thinks and acts coherently is going to have something he treats as God. It follows that rejecting God is against reason, because it makes coherent rational thought impossible. The only serious question is how to regularize that situation and make the best of it.
Atheists are irrational
I think you make a great point. The dominant culture says that religion is irrational and atheism (or at least agnosticism) is the only rational structure.
I think it’s the opposite. It is atheism that is irrational. I’ve studied many philosophers both old and new, theist (whether pagan, jewish or Christian) and atheist.
The only atheist who I’ve seen who is absolutely consistent is Nietzsche and that was because he had an entire materialist world view built on the bones of a pre-Christian cosmology.