You say, “Godlessness is a cold, dark, and hopeless place.” But that’s facile because the universe would hardly be just cold, dark, and hopeless without God. Nature is full of planets and stars (as well as the cold and dark vacuum of outer space). Atheists would have nature in place of a personal deity, so they could be pantheists (because nature would have created and developed itself and would therefore be the supreme creative power).

And you say, “there are no atrocities in godlessness because there are no transcending morals to define an atrocity as something bad.” That’s a canard, though, because theism doesn’t help with the meta-ethical problem of grounding morality. Why obey God’s commandments? What makes those commandments worthy of being obeyed? Because God’s more powerful than us?

If God’s much smarter than us, wouldn’t that knowledge consist in God’s recognition of some objective, independent truth? And if God’s values are based on independent facts, we wouldn’t need him to acknowledge them. If the facts in question pertain to God’s nature, and God couldn’t change his mind about what he is, he wouldn’t be all-powerful. If he could change his nature, his commandments would be arbitrary. Either way, if God is a disembodied mind, basing morality on God would make morality subjective, not objective. Morality would be relative to God’s mind, not to ours.

If we can’t reason our way to some universal conception of right and wrong, we have no hope of moral improvement, regardless of whether we’re atheists or theists. And who says morals must be “transcendent”?