Of course, societies evolve on their own, and few if any of us are in a position to dictate the terms to everyone else. Even an emperor's dictates might eventually be ignored shortly after his or her death.

But this article proposes a thought experiment. Is there such a thing as the ideal atheistic society? If it turned out, for instance, that religious societies were more sustainable than secular ones, wouldn't that be a practical problem for atheists? It wouldn't refute atheism, of course, or prove that God exists. But it would be a serious problem because atheists need to live too, and they can't live on atheism/bread alone.

I get it, you're not interested in existentialism. The absurdity of life emerges only from a certain perspective. Ordinarily, even stalwart existentialists may ignore that perspective and find themselves engrossed in certain activities. The fact that we can be easily sidetracked, though, doesn't mean there's no underlying, existential problem.

Indeed, life within developed society is mundane and predicable. But why did we develop that kind of society? What do the automations of that society imply about how we'd prefer to live? Evidently, we'd rather live as civilized, behaviourally modern people than as quasi-animalistic hunter-gatherers in the wild. That means we inherit the existential problem of being people in a wider world of animals and of inanimate objects. We inherit the potential for alienation that arises when we reflect on those foundational facts, from a philosophical standpoint. The fact that we're typically too busy with our work and family lives to notice doesn't make that problem go away. It's just a question of how deep we need our understanding to be to get by.