I was interested to read where Jack the Sailor said this:

Being a strident Atheist give one all of the drawbacks of having religion with none of the benefits.

I tend to agree with you, Jack. And I have tended to agree with that statement for sixty years while I have sometimes called myself an agnostic and sometimes an atheist. Some of the benefits of religious belief I recognize are emotional, some social; those are the benefits of the belief itself, regardless of the truth of what's believed in. Then, if the truth of the belief were really there and I believed, there would presumably be what I'll refer to as "supernatural benefits".

And as an "out of the closet atheist", there are definitely social drawbacks. If one were weak in one's atheist position, unsure of the logic of one's beliefs, the uncertainty would be uncomfortable, and a drawback.

But recognizing that "If I just believed X, I suppose I'd gain a lot regardless of what might be the untruth of the proposition" doesn't suddenly make X believable. The fact is that I don't find X (the whole theist and Christian position, in this context) believable, and I cannot find it believable despite much thought, reading, and discussion over the last sixty years, and I WILL NOT PRETEND to believe X in order illegitimately to claim some of the social benefits. And further, if I were merely pretending to believe in order to gain the social benefits I wouldn't get the putative emotional benefits either; instead, I'd get a negative "benefit" by knowing myself to be intellectually dishonest, knowingly engaged in self-deception or the deception of others.

That being the case, I would not characterize myself as "a strident atheist", to use your words, Jack. I really, truly wouldn't want to talk a convinced theist out of his position (if that were even possible), because I would be harming him, depriving him at least of the emotional and possibly the social benefits, and the supernatural benefits too, in the unlikely event that there were any.

Dave Oesterreich