Yes, of course. But, technically, they do claim to worship him, even in jest!
LOL
This doesn’t necessarily means I’m atheist as you can be spiritualist or pantheist like Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes and most great philosophers.
Understandable, given that the term "atheist" is controversial and often misunderstood. Sam Harris prefers to not use it and instead use no label at all for himself (though others of course continue to label him as such). Unfortunately, if you call yourself a spiritualist or pantheist, someone is equally likely to misunderstand you, if not even more. They may assume that you're into seances, fortune tellers, crystals and other such New Age gunk. Either way you are left having to explain with more detail.
Maybe the fact that religions make little logical sense is a key positive feature? Maybe it improves group cohesion, community and feelings of acceptance and belonging when people join together in beliefs that obviously make little or no rational sense?
IIRC, Hitchens and Harris said that they became more active in their fight against religion due to 911 and other Islamist terrorism and extremism, yet I haven't seen any actual effect from their efforts on reducing or rolling back Islamist terrorism or extremism. If everyone in the West abandoned religion, it seems to me that it would actually be a sort of unilateral disarmament and make the job of the Islamists easier, rather than harder. For atheism to help, we would need the Islamists to become atheists, not Christians, Jews and Hindus.
This rabbi argued along the same lines:
"you cannot expect the foundations of western civilisation to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact. That is what the greatest of all atheists, Nietzsche, understood with terrifying clarity and what his -latter-day successors fail to grasp at all."
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8932301/atheism-has-failed-only-religion-can-fight-the-barbarians/I doubt that western civilization would totally crumble without religion, yet I don't see the most secular nations like the Scandinavian countries as being enthusiastic combatants against ISIS and Islamism. Instead, it is religious peoples like Kurds, Shiites and Christians who are most fervently fighting ISIS (the fact that many of them are under direct threat also helps motivate them, of course). Secularists would probably argue that the wars would dissipate and disappear if Westerners all became more secular, but that seems naively overoptimistic to me.
