Father’s Day, that wonderful occasion when we celebrate our dads, is a time when all of us who have terrific dads need to feel sorry for atheists. It’s not such a happy day for them. That’s the take-away from a book called Faith of the Fatherless: the Psychology of Atheism by psychology professor Paul Vitz who examines the lives of militant atheists and concludes that at the heart of their disbelief lies a disappointing and sometimes abusive experience with the atheist’s earthly dad. Having felt no love from their own dads, they just can’t believe in a God the Father who loves them.

Vitz, a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at New York University who earned his Ph.D. at Stanford, is intellectually equipped to meet Sigmund Freud, psychology’s Big Daddy, on his own turf. Freud is the original God-scoffer who invented the catechism that all other God-scoffers have faithfully parroted up to the modern era of God-scoffers: “Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.” Freud’s theory over the years has evolved into the writing and ranting of today’s popular God debunkers who habitually brand religious believers as fools, ignoramuses, and Neanderthals with a childish need for security in the sky in the form of an Almighty Whatever.

But protesting so much sounds less academic than it does, well, personal. And so it is with Siggy: so personal that Freud’s troubles with his father started in childhood when he told his son he would amount to nothing, and the boy recalled that “I used to run as if I wanted to get off from my father, when I was scarcely able to walk.” Freud’s negative feelings toward his father at the same time he was his loving mother’s favorite child likely informed his discovery of the psychoanalytical development stage he called the Oedipus Complex, named for the mythical Greek prince who unwittingly killed his father and then married his mother.

Vitz, who was himself an atheist until his late 30’s when he became a Catholic, examines the lives of over two dozen other famously influential and often belligerent nihilists and atheists from the 18th Century to the present, like Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, David Hume, Albert Camus, Voltaire, and Mr. God Is Dead himself, Friedrich Nietzsche. He finds that these “fathers” of the atheist movement, cheerleaders for Freud’s theory that belief is just wishful thinking, all had absent or bad dads.