Comment 3 by raytoman :

Atheists of course can have morals since, at a minimum, they believe humans are all one species with other fauna and even flora, as relations for the one and only life they will have on a small pebble in a vast universe that they are trying to understand.

no. atheists are characterised by not believing in god (or gods). The hippy cosmological stuff is your own invention.

Human understanding has been held back by religion (which still culls our brightest and best who question) for tens of millennia with progress mainly limited to the past 5-600 years of the 3.7 billion years of life on our pebble.

I don'tthink religion held humans back for most of that 3.7 billion years as neither humans nor religion existed for most of that time. Modern humans have only been around for a few million years.