To a much greater extent than is generally recognised, those of us who don't believe in God often long for the enduring consolations of faith. In my experience, this happens on two main types of occasion.
It happens, first, when confronting mortality, especially that of loved ones. And it also happens when attending religious rituals which illuminate three ideas beyond the scope of secular experience: communion - that is, communal piety - transcendence, and the idea of the sacred.
Many years ago, as a reporter on the Independent, I covered a story that caused me to attend Friday prayers at the East London Mosque. I presume readers of this publication are very familiar with ceremonies of mass observance but, despite my devotion to most sports, I am not, having been raised by Hindu parents who never stipulated a family holiday to the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage.
I was therefore dazzled by the sight of several hundred men, who were arranged in parallel lines, their feet pressed against one another to form a human chain and keep out dark spirits, descend en masse to the floor upon the imam's instruction.
Islam places great store in the umma, the community of believers, but is far from unique in its evocation of this communal piety. At midnight mass over Christmas, in St Mary's, the extraordinary, 13th-century parish church of the village of Great Brington in Northamptonshire, the Christian version was impressed upon me.
Religion answers our human needs
When members of the congregation kneeled to take communion, as the robed messengers in front of them invoked the blood of Christ, precisely the same instrument of community-building was on display.
And why might the irreligious yearn for it? Only because the strength of solidarity, of fellow-feeling born of humility before God's awesome power, is something secular folk find hard to replicate.
Sport, tribal allegiance, and political ideology (especially in its totalitarian form) are capable of generating their own forms of solidarity, of course. Yet perhaps they are more fragile, and less hallowed, than that which faith creates. Secular societies are in fact ruled by repressed religion, precisely because religion answers enduring human needs that secularism generally cannot.
One of those needs is for transcendence, the idea that distinguishes religious thinking from philosophy. Judaism excels at this, not least by appearing to convey meaning from beyond the skies. Faith, and the rituals it inspires, raises the believer if not to a different metaphysical realm, at least to the sense that such a realm is possible, or indeed exists.
This sacred realm offers hope of realising that ultimate human ambition: eternal life. Even if we do not wish this for ourselves - for example, when we are old and frail - anyone who has grieved will know how natural it is to wish it for others.
Affection, or at least sympathy for these three ideas - communion, transcendence, the sacred - distinguish the atheist from the anti-theist. The latter thinks God's existence a kind of tyranny; the former recognises its improbability, but wonders what benefits might be accrued from a kind of benign celestial dictatorship.
The late, great Christopher Hitchens and noble comrades of his, such as Richard Dawkins, would dismiss such a phrase as oxymoronic; and of course it is the very nature of faith to accept oxymorons. But I am tempered in my solidarity with those men by a lust for the reassurances, and thrills, of religious experience, knowing them to be ultimately out of reach.
Religion, in Philip Larkin's unimprovable phrase, is indeed "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die". Yet even we sceptics have been known sometimes to pretend.
