Hello (he said, sneaking in hoping not to get noticed...) Well, Joe, I agree with almost everything you said in that original post, though I think you're seriously wrong about God's hand in evolution and I could give you a constructive fight over that any time...

Just to straighten a couple of things out here. I can't speak for any atheist other than myself (when I've been bold enough to try that I've been shouted down, so I won't try again). First, any atheist worth his or her salt will always cheerfully acknowledge the right of anyone to follow and practise any creed they like. Yes, Stalin and Mao were atheists but they were most decidedly not my kind of atheist because they were intolerant of beliefs other than their own. Second, any atheist worth his or her salt will cheerfully acknowledge that many people of religion have been inspired by their faith to do wonderful work. I've often said that we atheists are such a disparate bunch that we never get our act together in this regard anything like as well as believers do. Third, there is, to any atheist worth his or her salt, a very sharp faultline between what individuals of faith get up to and what big organised religion gets up to. It is perfectly possible to see the validity of the one and completely reject it in the other.

What causes the worst arguments, by and large, is when people professing to be atheists, but who have so far failed to articulate the reason for their atheism, clash with believers who are so soaked in certainty about their faith that they think nothing of declaring that certainty to the world at large. I have standards to which I think all so-called atheists should be held, and the cardinal one is that no atheist should ever declare that they are certain there is no God. It simply is not possible to hold to that position. Even Dawkins will tell you that. We can point to the lack of evidence for God and the fact that he breaks all the rules of nature, etc., but none of that is "proof" he does not exist. But I feel that believers must also accept that there can be no certainty, and with that acceptance comes a certain humility that many atheists don't see in believers and which causes so much of the friction. It's very hard to take for an atheist when someone starts a thread "asking for prayers..." on a forum that they well know contains non-believers. We're fairly broad-minded, but that is an insult. There's no reason why you couldn't just ask for kind thoughts, is there. The ethos for believers should be that such thoughts can be kept private and between people who feel the same way, out of respect for non-believers. Doing it the other way implies a disrespect if you think about it, even a degree of arrogance, though most good atheists are pretty tolerant of that stuff.

The big battles are caused when people breach the aforementioned unspoken rules. No believer is an idiot for believing, though many are all too happy to be so certain that they have the one and only valid story that they are happy to attack those who are at variance with them. No atheist is an idiot for not believing, though it is a huge mistake to offend individuals on the grounds of their beliefs alone. Attacking organised religion is an entirely different matter, and I think that more they are challenged, right down to the core, the healthier it is. Of course, some people don't like that. Tough. And we atheists have it tough too, remember, in world which has religion at its core by default.