FYI, I think it is generally attributed to Rabbi Hillel.

Thanks! Honestly that was my second guess. :)

And I am still waiting for the charitable orders, hospitals, books saved for posterity--and music produced by atheists.

For books, I'll give you Being and Nothingness by Sartre. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by Rand. Not saying how good or bad they are, but they are classics and will be saved for posterity.

But perhaps what a State should be is agnostic, leaving all such matters up to the individuals.

Amen, amen, and amen!

In that case we need to excise the word from the dictionary.

I don't think it's as bad as all that. It's just that it's off-limits to people who want to say they are being open-minded about a question, or who protest that they're not claiming to have proved God doesn't exist (for proofs are subject to critical analysis and refutation and who wants that?!). In short, it's hypocritical for Dawkins to use it the way he does.

A story told by someone long-dead in a heavily-edited and translated book is not verifiable (unless you can somehow find several different completely independent sources, and verify that independence). Even then it's still a story and you can't grill the bloke who wrote it. There is a difference.

Yep, and that's why belief in God isn't a scientific belief, and subjecting it to scientific tests/procedures is naff. Sorry, that's rude. It's a category error.

How does one verify independence of sources? One way is to show that they disagree on some details -- if they agree on everything it's probable that one is copying the other. And the gospels do disagree on a lot of fiddly details (Matthew has 2 animals on Palm Sunday, for instance, where Luke has 1). Of course the response to this will be that this just proves that they're not accurate and so can be dismissed! We can't win. A man who has bought a theory will fight a vigorous, rearguard action against the facts (Lord Acton).

The heavily-edited and translated thing approaches an urban legend. We have (literally hundreds of) chunks of the NT (on papyrus mostly) that can be physically dated back into the 2nd and sometimes 1st century, and the differences between that and the later full manuscripts are teensy. Modern translations are made from the most attested manuscripts and thus are coming straight from the horse's mouth, as it were. The whole thing about a translation of a translation of a translation (ya-da) held in the 16th century. It's no longer the case.