All views, as Richard said, are not equally valid. I should like to make the distinction between holding a view that is just wacky and holding that wacky view and wanting the whole world to adhere to it. Personally, I regard any view that involves the existence of a deity as irrational. Wacky if you like. Whether or not you are ever able to be persuaded away from that view is up to you. That's entirely respectable. What is not respectable is telling people that you hold the truth, making your children go to mass or religious instruction or telling scientists that they are wrong about the origins of everything without any evidence of your own. The trouble is, these things are so deeply ingrained due to religion successfully making itself the world's default setting that it looks intemperate when some little voice pipes up to oppose them. Look at the example of herding children to Sunday Mass. What more benign family occasion could there be? You get nicely dressed and you meet other members of your community in a friendly and sociable setting, away from the daily grind. Very nice! But, inside that church, every prayer said, every hymn sung and every piece of the liturgy is replete with certainty about a God for whom there is not a scrap of evidence. That is at the heart of what you are really exposing your children to. As a responsible and loving parent you try to get the best school for your kids where the education is second to none. You want your children to come away with the the vital life skills of questioning what they are told, wanting knowledge and knowing how to get it. Yet you allow this big hole to appear in all that in which you expect them to accept the bogus certainties of your faith without question (try interrupting the priest to ask how he knows what he's asserting!). It doesn't matter how nice a fellow you are, that simply can't be right. It might look valid and respectable but that's because religion has had thousands of years to apply this benign patina to cover the nefarious activities such as homophobia, misogyny, fear of science and religious bigotry which lie just beneath the surface in most major religions. The respectable position would be to privately practise your faith, tell your children what you're up to and why, and let them decide what to do about it for themselves when they are adults. But, for some reason, this decent and reasonable path is viewed with horror. Janie, I have no quibble as to what values, beliefs or paradigms shape the thinking of individuals and I'm not making any moral judgements about them. Holding beliefs, even delusions, is the inalienable right of everyone. If how you act on those beliefs, treating them as certainties when they are not, impinges on other people, then that's a different matter altogether, and that's where respectability ends, no matter how benign the external appearance.

Ed, do tell me where my logic failed in that post.

McGrath, if I misrepresent someone in a post I expect to be pulled up for it.