You're just being silly to even bother quoting that, Bill. ;-) It's completely beside the point, and it's intention is to ridicule.

The point is that the road to higher evolution, thus greater consciousness, lies inside each one of US...not out there in some kind of external all-powerful ruling deity. The road to higher evolution is not imaginary. It's a real factor in our lives. If people call their own higher potential "God", that's just a word that points toward their own higher potential. It's a cultural label. If they then start to imagine that higher potential as being separate and outside of them....and something to be appeased and bargained with and feared...that's their mistake, but it doesn't in any way invalidate the fact that they DO have a higher potential within themselves.

It is the word "God" you have trouble with, Bill, and the word "heaven" and you wish to attack the words, I think. The words are nothing more than signposts. You are reacting to the signposts, while I am talking about what the signposts point toward, what they allude to, that goes way beyond religion. Religion has attempted, however, to define it in various ways, and that has led to cultural words...labels...such as "God". Or "enlightement". Or "perfection". Or "evolution". Or "love". Etc...

People develop strong loyalties to one or another of those labels, likes and dislikes for the labels themselves, and from that point on they stop thinking...they just react, either positively or negatively, to the label, to the word and they forget to think about what it points toward.

And they fight with each other about nothing. And miss the point entirely.

Your Mr Swinburne has nothing useful to say. He's like a snotty-nosed brat in the schoolyard, amusing himself by going "na-na-na-na-na" at the skinny kid with the glasses, and imagining how much cooler he is than that kid.