“To imagine that God wants prayers and hymns of praise is to make him out to a sort of oriental potentate; while praying for favours is an attempt to get him to change his allegedly all-wise mind.”

As for the accusation of intellectual pride, surely the boot is on the other foot. Atheists don’t claim to know anything with certainty — it’s the believers who know it all.

To imagine that “God moves in mysterious ways” is to put up a smokescreen of mystery behind which fantasy may survive in spite of all the facts.

People who believe in a divine creator, trying to live their lives in obedience to his supposed wishes and in expectation of a supposed eternal reward, are victims of the greatest confidence trick of all time.

As for an eternity in heaven – that would be hell!

This is not to say, of course, that there is no purpose in life at all: we all make our own purposes as we go through life. And life does not lose its value simply because it it not going to last forever.

The one function that most gods seem to have in common is to give human existence some ultimate purpose – and, while it is not possible to disprove an ultimate purpose, there does not seem to be any evidence for it.

Why am I an atheist? The short answer is that I cannot accept any of the alternatives. I simply don’t find them believable.

While there continues to be differences, the important point is that all citizens and elected officials use democratic and legal avenues for solving those differences.

I think the hymns give us a glimpse of the generations before us, and what was important to them at the time.

The Beatles, which had just as much influence on me as those hymns did.