Religions have blood-soaked histories that justify the scorn which hard-core rationalists like Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, pour on them. But Professor Dawkins and his fellow atheists go further than condemning the cruelties, hypocrisies and inconsistencies, not to say frequent lunacies, of all religions. They reject, contemptuously, the concept that there is a God. They can find no evidence that God exists; they look almost with horror upon any belief in an afterlife as a childish delusion; and they find faith in the revelations which underpin all religions absurdly misguided.
In particular, the hard-core rationalists point out that the explanations given for the origin and development of human life by the theory of evolution, plus the inexorable march of science, make unnecessary the existence of an Originator or Ultimate Explainer and Protector which mankind required through most of history to make sense of all that was going on and going wrong.
