Do you ever doubt your atheism?

[Chas]

How could it be a 'necessary truth'? That is an argument from ignorance.
And it couldn't be a theory of everything - it has no actual explanatory power - not a scientific theory at all.

Religions come nowhere near the ideal you propose, and it does not seem their purpose to do so.

Unless your claim is that being springs forth from non-being ex nihilo nihil fit, then it seems you have to propose a necessary being.

I'm not, and no I don't. The use of the word 'being' refers to an intentional entity. If you are using it in some other sense, you have not made that explicit.

It was most commonly debated whether or not this necessary being was the Universe or God. To the past free thinkers who held that it was the Universe, modern cosmology would seem to have delivered them a near fatal blow. That's primarily what I was saying as far as current discoveries running parallel to theistic arguments down the ages... How you misconstrued this to mean that I ever suggested God is a scientific hypothesis... well I don't know.

Sorry, but it's not clear to me what modern cosmology deals a fatal blow to.

You're right about most religions falling short of this ideal... and many properly deserve the name "superstition" as well as the criticism they receive... but that still doesn't mean there isn't something valuable to retain from them and that an opposite extreme isn't itself victim to it's own narrow-mindedness. I'm simply putting the suggestion out there as a thought that creeps up in my mind every now and then.

There is nothing valuable in any religion that is not available from a non-religious source. So, there's that.