Ok, a few observations..

Joe Offer (scroll up a few...) takes a sentence of my admiration of Dawkin and sadly takes it out of context. Come on Joe, we can all do a bit better than that. I do have sympathy (empathy? Have to think about that,) with your frustration that people judge religious belief at the fundamentalist level. ie., you have faith therefore you are a fundamentalist.

I can see where Joe is right in saying "Don't judge me with that yardstick." I am a huge football fan and my support for my team has parallels with religious faith. In the '70s and to a much smaller degree since, violence within crowds at matches has been evident. Therefore, the term football fan has been successfully crossed with football hooligan. I'm still a huge fan of my team and get to as many matches as I can. But I resent being tarred with the same brush as the idiots. I guess this is Joe's point regarding religion?

Mind you, by swelling the crowds at the match, could I be seen as encouraging the idiots? Moot point.... some could, (unfairly I know..) say that people like Joe give respectability to the dangerous fundamentalist looneys who profess their take on religion in a way that goes well beyond the moral compass and metaphor.

I like the phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." as put forward by Shimrod. However, the invisible goo monster behind my chair right now would have to possibly exist if we thought that through enough. I prefer Einstein's take that atheism cannot be the ultimate answer as that infers chaos, and the laws of physics work every time, so chaos cannot be the answer.

I notice bell ringing has cropped up. Here's one for you. My wife is a bell ringer, and many of our friends are. Funnily enough, once the service starts, you will find most bell ringers either in the cafe (mornings) or the pub (evenings.) It may be a service to the church from the church's perspective, but it is a hobby on the mathematical and (in their opinion) musical level to many of the people who practice it. Being a Christian or not is quite irrelevant. (A cathedral not too far away has a family of a father and a daughter ringing and they are Muslim. They love the hobby, tradition etc. and why not?)