Why does an Atheist still need religion?

Today you look around, and you see a beautiful society. Not perfect, but beautiful. Made in a way that promotes our race. Families, laws, rules, regulations, boundaries, restrictions...and freedom.

There might be a reason it is this way. And there might be a reason it had to be this way.

Society, to be in the way we see it today, needs law and order. And law and order needs fear. Fear needs recognition of a higher authority (or it should be the fear of survival). Recognition of an authority needs manufacture of consent (term borrowed from Noam Chomsky). And that, my friend, is provided by religion.
There are very few dogmas which provide this sort of absolute power as religion. Take democracy for example. Since democracy declares all people equal, why should one person obey another? So, there has to be a higher power to be feared. Yes - the government! But that again, is by people, and we've seen governments rise and fall many times throughout the history.

It might be a stupid similie, or it could be a brilliant one, but consider the world to a petri dish of bacteria. The bacteria multiplies on and on and on. They flourish and form big colonies and fill up the dish. But eventually, they just run out of food and they all die. There is no control to their reproduction.
We need something to keep us from doing that. Not reproduction, dimwit! Physically and Emotional overrun is what I mean. Well, even if taken literally, I guess we are more slotted to die by imploding on our mistakes rather than run out of food. Anyways, for control, we need to have a controlled society. And for control to be absolute, it should come from within, not be imposed.

So to manufacture consent, to draw a line which people fear from crossing, to make laws that everyone obeys, to pull a reign on the free imaginative mind, we need something...something greater than the human race. We need a greater power, an omnipotent absolute power, which can damn us to eternity, prevent us from attaining moksha, or do uncool stuff like that, if we do wrong (socially, that is).

One trait of humans is that they follow what they recognize as authorities. Now what they recognize as authorities, in our minds, is solidified by building it our subconscious from childhood through puberty to adulthood, by constantly bombardment all sides - through parents, through friends, through people who they regard as authorities, and so on and so forth through the various facets of society.

We have attained today, through trial and error, a liberal society that follows most of the rules for a normal social life. We did go a little overboard with religion once, in a time period called the "Middle Ages", the results of which are lavishly documented in various books and records. Fortunately, the counter force called science pulled us out of that one. It seems like a pendulum, once upset, there will rise a gravitational force which brings it back to the stable state, even though it takes time and destruction.

So, to sum it up, even for atheists, there is a need for religion - to build a stable society. Utopia is not possible in large populations - time and again we have proved that by the collapse of societies. Small populaces modelled around Utopia does exist today - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commune_(intentional_community). But to expect that of the whole world is too much to ask, in the situation that we are in.
Tight control and domination is also not sustainable, again, demonstrated time and again.

I wish we had a timestop, where the whole race is supposed to stop and introspect, accept our mistakes, learn from those, make new decisions - knowing that it can go wrong, and build the world a bit more better place. Unfortunately there is not such timestop, and no such authority to do it.
No wonder there are a lot of superhero stories nowadays. Legends of a civilization is always a reflection of its need.

Whoa! The sane part of my mind has overcome the whacky. Enough of mad thoughts! Ill stop now.
Peace.