Much better than the exhortations of behave or you'll go to hell, or I am smarter than you because I don't believe in fairies, angels, or witches:
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones." -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I deeply guess and hope the future will be of no need of any of these exhortations...
Those who are, for example, simple secular professional dancers or performers or musicians or administrative assistants, don't care about these sectarian issues. They care, wisely and smartly, just about their goals...
Atheism, for whatever you love sakes, is just a disbelief in the gods of civilizations. But you can still be a deist or a laical milkman, or a Buddhist believing in nirvana or even a yogi believing in the cosmic mind. If all this satisfies the principle of not affecting negatively others' lives, then why the sake your beliefs aren't going be pretty much welcome?
Plato, the preferred disliked rationalist/idealist by atheism, is still present in current science in the form of timeless, eternal, mathematical truths. This is the current reductionist, scientific approach that only sees layers towards the micro and the macro cosmos. They don't take time seriously; they think time is just a perception. But in this regard I am with Einstein, the very same guy who definitely took time off modern science:
"Once Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously. He explained than the problem of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation ... But Einstein thought than these scientific descriptions (mathematical axioms or equations) cannot possibly satisfy our human needs; that there is something essential about the Now which is just outside the realm of science." --Time Reborn, Lee Smolin (conversations Einstein/Rudolf Carnap).
And this is called by my fellow atheists retrograde... or "yes, that thing". Thomas Nagel...
I know I am a westerner with a pretty good life, but anyways the future I hope will be with no exhortations...
