I don't think intelligence and belief are incompatible; just as I don't think believers are fools. I know a lot of very clever believers - and a lot of very idiotic atheists. Like music, it's all a matter of taste. This has nothing to with the nature of the God Myth, or the nature of belief, or yet of religion which serves to engender and exploit that belief in a myriad of ways all of which are utterly inconsistent with one another. I spend a lot of time immersed in religious folklore, maybe too much (pity my long-suffering wife last week on the Three Hare Trail in darkest Devon!) but it's something of a passion of mine. The humanity of these things is paramount, just as an awareness of the inhumanity inherent therein is worth bearing in mind, but such is life.

There is one common reality we all share in; we are all born from it, and we we will all die back into it. Matter can't be created or destroyed, like it says in the Egyptian Book of the Dead : Existence is for all eternity. We are starstuff. As human beings we tell stories, and some of them catch on, for whatever reason. This doesn't make them true. Science is ongoing and revelatory, it is engendered by enlightenment that is (slowly but surely) replacing a need for the supernatural with something far greater than anything we have ever conceived of hitherto. Furthermore, it is real, it is everything, it is everywhere and it is common to us all. Unlike God, who is just a character in a book of noxious fairy tales told to children to get them to behave. Thus do I maintain, God is impossible simply because he is nowhere else other than in human fiction and, just like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, there are NO indicators whatsoever of him being a possibility. Least of all belief, no matter how intelligent the believer.