quote]I certainly found it hard to shake off in later life

Yes, clearly you're still a Catholic and tied to that belief system forever. ::rolleyes:: A quick look at the actual numbers of kids who are raised in Christian homes and then "fall away" i.e. cease to be Christians in later life, would indicate your despair over kids being raised as Christians is misplaced.[unquote]

Oh dear. I'm surprised at your lack of imagination in trotting out this standard, formulaic, banal riposte. Every person who's now an atheist but who was once a Catholic has heard this rubbish dozens of times. You can do better. Seems you can't be an ex-Catholic without being a militant, bitter, conscience-ridden, still-a-Catholic-deep-down-inside, ex-Catholic. You've sort of proved my point about one of organised religion's standard big ideas: to make it bloody tough to get out. Some of us made it, though I'm sure you'll disapprove. Did you not see where I said it wasn't exactly oppressive?

"As for what you believe, your evidence bar is set very low, which means that, whilst you don't want to believe something that isn't true, you don't mind believing something that is almost certainly not true.

You don't know where my evidence bar is; this is bluster. And "almost certainly not true" is not based on any obtainable objective register of probability (there is none) but on your own beliefs. In short, you believe one way, I believe the other. The difference is I'm not trying to slander you for your beliefs, or denigrate your atheism, or insult your decsion-making abilities."

No bluster. You don't want evidence because you have faith. Your faith is what stops you from seeking evidence. The search would be far too inconvenient, not to say fruitless. You're way down the evidence register and way up the faith register (though, like fossil missing links, there isn't a lot between the extremes). It's strange (ironic?) that you should resort to bringing objectivity into this argument. I would be interested to know what objective measure you apply to your belief in God. I have plenty of objective measures I can apply to my dismissal of God. I could start by saying that, by having your God at the heart of things, you are trying to explain the world by resort to something far more complex, rule-busting and inexplicable than anything the world contains. Tell me where your objectivity lies in all that. And yes, there is an objective measure of probability. A measure you can't exactly put a number to, but that's mainly because that number, were it to exist, would be vanishingly small.