You beat me to it, Penny!

The conclusion to one of the articles, by Victor Stenger (a physicist and philosopher), entitled, 'The God Hypothesis', sums up this thread beautifully:

"Finally, I would like to comment on the folly of faith. When faith rules over facts, magical thinking becomes deeply ingrained and warps all areas of life. It produces a frame of mind in which concepts are formulated with deep passion but without the slightest attention paid to evidence. Nowhere is this more evident than in the US today, where Christians who seek to convert the nation into a theocracy dominate the Republican party. Blind faith is no way to run a world."

I'll drink to that! Indeed it isn't!