"The fool has said in his heart, 'there is no God.'"  If you know anything about the Bible, you know that this phrase turns up in at least three psalms from the Hebrew writings and is echoed, in part, in the some of the writings of Paul which appear in the New Testament canon.
     But what does it really mean?  I know many atheists; I would not consider them to be fools or even foolish.  They're intelligent and wise.  The psalmist wrote these words many centuries ago, in a world in which everyone, from the greatest king to the lowliest farmer, believed in a divine presence.  Indeed, they believed it implicitly; belief in God was as normal and regular as the spring and autumn rains.  Hence, anyone who did not believe in God was, well, as the psalmist said, someone who was woefully out of touch with his/her culture and the facts of the world as everyone understand them.
     In the aftermath of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment, however, this all changed.  Today, many segments of Western society do not consider disbelief in God to be foolish at all.  In fact, disbelief is considered the most rational thing to do.
     Fair enough.  What people believed many centuries ago does not need to be necessarily valid for us today.  That's obvious.  On the other hand, given that the world continues to hum along on its merry way, malfunctioning of course at times, but, generally speaking, reasonably consonant with the fundamental rhythms of life and being which have been present since its beginning, we wonder:  has anything really changed about who we are?
     "Fool" is surely a harsh term.  No argument there.  If humanity has not definitively changed, however, I have to think that the deeper lesson of the Enlightenment is that we do not need to abandon everything about our past to engage more fully with whom we most are.