Is life more satisfying as an atheist or religionist?

[FrustratedFool]

Would you count Swift and Voltaire as religious?

Well, they were, weren't they? Both were scornful of clerical hypocrisy but they weren't atheists.

That whole voyage to Laputa in Gulliver's Travels, where the natives are obsessed with absurd research schemes, was a satire on the Dream of Reason. Voltaire's Doc Pangloss was the epitome of the man of science whose knowledge was little more than a slew of self-satisfied tautologies.

Fair enough.  But their texts weren't religious texts, and that's the important point.