evidence: Russell and other activist atheists believed that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the "God hole" — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action — mostly by engaging in virtue-signalling theatre on behalf of a victimised minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything."