Arne, your post is a delight. Many of your points, BTW, are echoed at Beliefnet in the Proselytizing board. In that board, people tend to eschew Basherama as a sport and focus on exchanging actual thought.

My post above was not directed at people willing to converse with mutually open minds. The open mind seems to be a rare thing these days, from any viewpoint. But mine is open to learning from others similarly equipped. I just don't put much stock in what comes out of the apparently closed ones... it tends to leak out from the nether regions!

So I would hope you can see that I was not assuming a "need" on your part to hie yourself hence to Beliefnet, and in fact I am not "targeting" atheists at all-- I was addressing people of any variety of rigidity who defend mockery by calling it humor. But Beleiefnet is a great, diverse, hopping site, and it's set up to handle a lot of things that don't go too well here at the Mudcat.

Hope to hear from you again. It would be interesting.

~Susan