Salon.com Life | Now more than ever Walking down Houston Street in New York this afternoon, in what a few days ago was the shadow of the Twin Towers, a woman lowered the umbrella that had been shielding her daughter and herself from the tapering rain. "Those were God's tears," she explained to her little girl.

My mother had a very different explanation for her daughter today. "To me, this rain is proof that there is no God," she said on the phone from Boston. "People say that God can't help terrorism, that he gives people freedom to act as they choose. Fine. But a God who would hinder the rescue workers with rain? If God can't control nature, then what's the point? How can anyone believe today?"

It's a bewildering day for us atheists, this state-appointed "Day of Prayer and Remembrance." Like the faithful, we mourn. We look for guidance. We look for answers. Our commander in chief tells us to find solace in churches and temples. In those churches and temples, people stand at podiums, survey their mass of grief-stricken congregants and intone the unfathomable words "God will protect us."

Like many New Yorkers, I've seen the shattering hell of mass destruction this week. None of this is metaphor: I have touched the ash-covered shoulders of gasping survivors. I have trudged through the debris that thickly coats the ghost town of Tribeca, staring in shock at the five-story pyre that was a tower of human life and achievement. I have watched families crumple into each other in shaking, tear-soaked sorrow outside St. Vincent's Hospital when they are told, no, there is no information about your sister, your husband, your daughter. And I have done so without experiencing what some people have described to me as a uniting surge of faith in some omniscient, everlasting force that will make us all whole again.