Yup, this thread is in grave danger of resorting to your God versus my God, or non god or whatever...

The thread is always going to have people, myself included, putting our own stance in front of our comments in order that others know where you are coming from. There are many ways to be religious and many ways to be non religious. I for instance am more comfortable with "irreligious" meaning it is as important to me as say stamp collecting or bird watching.

Many religious people are comfortable with the notion that governments should take religion into account and many atheists are comfortable with the notion of a secular legislature. Put the two views in the same room and of course you get fireworks. I see no reason why the needs of birdwatchers should be ignored whilst the needs of religious people need countries to acknowledge and conform to their views. if stamp collectors through whatever reason decided that they shouldn't go shopping on a particular day of the week, I doubt they would want a government to force shops to shut for the rest of us...

Mind you, this thread is already getting into the "prove God exists" realm. I doubt you can prove it, and by inference you can't prove otherwise. It depends on which level you want. You can't prove to me that an invisible furry creature isn't sat in front of my fire whilst I type here, but to be fair, i can't prove he does. At the extreme level, nothing exists until you observe it, or ceases to exist when you do. (I assume that if God did exist, he / it would exist also at the quantum level, hence Heisenberg appears to have killed him back in the early 1920's. Bit of a bugger, but there you go.)