Is atheism self-contradictory ?

[Astonished]

The gazelle does a little math of it's own when it surveys the savannah.  Namely, "less than or more than 1 cheetah."  

And the cheetah doesn't just say "OOH GAZELLE YUMZ TIME TA EAT!" They seek from afar, scouting, searching for the weak one that can be preyed upon the most easily. Same with animals at the watering hole; they look around carefully so that when they're at their most vulnerable, they aren't going to be caught unawares. These may not be genetic per se, but they are capable of learning them with whatever sort of brains they have, and the behaviors (memes, in the evolutionary sense) that lead to surviving, irrational or not, survive along with the organisms that practice them. There's no reason both rational and irrational behaviors can't coexist with the same species as long as they help the organism survive. It's just a matter of determining whether they are in fact necessary to the survival or just vestigial. We're just lucky we've evolved to the point where we can understand all of this and can come to the objective conclusion that religion is an unnecessary holdover from when whatever function it previously served was no longer useful for the same purpose and it mutated into something unrecognizable and would be best if we abandoned it. The religious mind doesn't realize it but if their selection is the one that wins out (if they start flexing their muscles again and start killing infidels and unbelievers) they'll drive themselves to extinction because it's an inherently unsustainable means of doing anything. The fact that those who didn't let faith dominate their entire lives have been putting out their fires from the beginning doesn't mean that religion had something positive to provide towards survival value, it means that in spite of all the damage it's done, secular values are keeping the species from going under.