"Well, Steve, I usually try hard to see the positive side. But how does one see the positive side of something negative? If you reverse polarity, you'll blow up your car battery. Where have you said anything positive about religious believers? And if I'm a religious believer, how do I respond positively to your barrage of negative statements about believers? Steve, you have used many of the 696 posts in this thread to attack religion and religious beliefs and believers. I'll agree that religion warrants rational criticism, but not your shotgun approach."

Well here's exactly how I see religion. Cards on the table. gloves off.

First, by any measure of evidence and reason, you are wrong. There is almost certainly no God. I'm fine with that, actually.

Second, your personal, privately-held delusions are of no concern to me as long as that's how they stay.

Third, religion has held sway on this planet for plenty long enough. It stops people looking for real answers, it subjects them to arbitrary "moral codes" which are often the most immoral things imaginable, what with bans on contraception, abortion, homosexuality and the subjugation of women, hallmarks of most of the major religions. The penalties for apostasy range from social exclusion to having your head cut off.

Fourth, religion likes to get you early so that you find it hard to escape. Those who do the entrapping will often claim that their children "have the choice to leave" when they get older. This is always a lie. Imagine if my dad had signed me up to the Conservative Party as soon as I'd been born. For the next twenty years I get bombarded with Tory Party literature and get frogmarched to weekly meetings at which I'm told that only the Tories know truth and that all other persuasions are evil. Each meeting contains selected chants from the Tory manifesto and we round the thing off, under a large portrait of the Queen of course, with a few choruses of Land Of Hope And Glory. After twenty years of this maleducation, I'm told, reluctantly ( probably only if I bring it up), that I can choose to leave. Very funny! But that is what some big religions do, and some don't even give you that choice. If you think that's right, I'm not with you.

Fifth, and to my mind worst of all, you are so certain of your faith that you have no compunction in passing mythology as truth down to your children. You may defend this by saying you tell them that we can discuss it openly and give free rein to doubts and worries. Well that's a bit like sitting in the Man U dressing room trying to discuss how great Man City are. I think it's wicked to send children to religious schools, where you haven't a clue what they're going to be told and where, for significant parts of the day, they will subjected to instruction and ceremony designed primarily to keep them in line.

Sixth, more of an annoyance than anything, I have no desire to be constantly subjected to public displays of huge crucifixes on the outsides of your places of worship or your wayside pulpits or Thought For The Day or Songs Of Praise or unelected archbishops in the Lords or people on online forums telling me they'll pray for me (do something constructive instead, buggering off for example!). Stop acting as if you have a monopoly on the truth. You absolutely haven't, and a bit more religious humility, a quality promoted by Jesus that appears to be lost on some of you, wouldn't come amiss.

Is it fair to attack religion?   Absolutely it is, at every opportunity. It's bad for world peace, and it's bad for children, women and poor people. Everything you say that's good about religion can be achieved without it. We're a lot better off standing on our own feet. Kick the crutches away!

Is it fair to attack believers? It's fair to express an opinion on belief. It's fair to attack people who propagate religion in the ways I've described, every time. It's fair to vehemently attack those unthinking people who subject children to nonsense. It's not fair to attack fair-minded people who keep their beliefs strictly to themselves. It's fair to attack wicked and damaging people who are lionised by believers, at least three recent Popes and Mother Teresa for example. And, before you say anything, what I am is not equal and opposite to what you are. You put me here by dint of your religious bad behaviour, remember. In a world of dignified, quiet, private belief, I wouldn't exist.