Nice analysis, John.

While you make a good point, I feel I should point out that you tend to brush atheists in rather broad strokes. Most atheists I know would never claim that they know with any certainty that God does not exist, but rather that in the absence of evidence we must assume he does not. We would not assume the flying spaghetti monster exists without evidence, even though at a philosophical level you can't disprove it.

I have read Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion", and I recognize the emotion in it. To feel emotion is to be human, and when arguing about something we feel passionate about it's only natural. It is often only because of a passionate, charismatic zealot that society moves forward.

Having been born into a community of fundamentalist Christians, I am well aware of the kind of torture such beliefs can inflict on the mind. I cannot see even extreme atheism in anywhere near the same light as religious extremism. My indoctrination made even questioning the faith a source of great guilt and trepidation.

And while the great majority of religious moderates out there are not particularly dangerous, it is this attitude that it's OK to believe anything you wish, however unsupported by the evidence, that serves to enable the fundamentalists. As for me, I WOULD argue with a Seventh Day Adventist or a Mormon, because I see a bit of my former self in them, and argument was not futile in my case. I would not argue for atheism per se (I'm not even sure I'm atheist myself--just somewhere in between agnosticism and atheism), but merely for critical re-examination of whatever it was they happened to believe.

We may not be living in the Middle Ages any more, but religion still does have a considerable influence on people and politics, especially here in the US. Would suicide bombers really still commit their acts if their religion didn't glorify it and teach that they would be rewarded for it after death?

Someone recently made me aware of the the often misunderstood difference between agnostic and atheist. While most people think agnostics are the fence sitters, it's acutally athiests. Atheists don't belive there is a god or gods because the datat doesn't support the conclusion. Give us affirmative data and we'll believe.

Agnostics on the other hand, believe we can't know if there is a god or not.

I would so very mch like to live in world where religion was irrelevant. In the US we live in many ways in middle ages.

I conduct my life withoiut involving the idea of God let alone the "existence" of whatever the word is taken to signify.

Rationality has certainly played a part in my adopting this position. It's not a matter of proving that the word does not referr to anything but that I find after long consideratrion that I have a more satisfactory account of lfe without it.

But this is not just a personal academic matter. God is constatly being used to gain privilege for institutions and individualss - and in England our
schools are required to have collecitive acts of worship of a "supreme being".

We cannot adopt a detached agnostic attitude to this use of God - he may not exist but we feel his imfluence.

"The only rational position is that of the agnostic"
You sure sound allknowing to be an "agnostic".

Being an agnostic would be logical if the two propositions "God exists" and "God does not exist" were equally reasonable. But they are not.

There are no scientific observances of God, while all other scientific observances fit in with Atheism.
So, while nitpicking agnostics may say that this does not rule out the existance of God it gives a good statistical measure of the probability.

What a load of PC tosh!, or perhaps it's really cowardice?
I cannot prove as Richard Dawkins said that there are Fairies living at the end of my garden with 100% proof, however I personally have no problem saying with 100% certainty that there are no fairies living at the end of my garden. The same applies to god/s. Although it might be PC or even strictly speaking in the scientific methodology to say anything with 100% certainty, in the everyday world, there is no practical difference between 99.9999 adinfinitum and 100%.
Agnostics are merely fence sitters, as Strappodo said, it's only a viable option IF the evidence is @50/50. I cannot believe that any rational person would agree that the odds of god/s are anywhere near 50%, in fact I would guess that they are about as close to 0 as you can get without actually reaching it, so in effect, the odds are 0 that god/s and Fairies and the FSM and a whole host of other nonsense are 0.
Unless some new evidence occurs which will provide a shred of evidence of the existence of "supernatural" entities, I am quite happy with saying god does not exist :)

Stublore is right to push the fairies, pixies,imps, trolls, brownies et cetera et cetera.

From his review Mr Burnside is quite clearly not prepared to deny their existence.

Is this the next PC ?

Burnside seems to think that agnosticism automatically presupposes a 50/50 split as the only rational option. This is fallacious. Agnosticism (without knowledge) and atheism( without belief) are compatible attitudes. Most atheists would classify themselves as agnostic atheists. I do not know whether my coffee table turns into a goat when no-one is looking, this does not mean that a 50/50 split on the issue is the rational option.
Ultimately, the God that is posited by Burnside and many other liberal intellectuals as well the theologians and apologists, is a benign and epiphenomenal one. This god is handy in theological apologetics when the forces of inquiry and empirical rationalism are bearing down, but has little to do with the idea of God that the multitudes subscribe to.

The arguments about faith, so tediously rehearsed that they grind round in a circle of wretchedness, may be reaching a final conclusion? A rude shock for both atheists and religious is spreading on the web.

The first wholly new interpretation for 2000 years of the moral teachings of Jesus the Christ is on the web. It focuses specifically on marriage and human sexuality, overturning all natural law ethics and theory. At stake is the credibility of several thousand years of religious history and moral theology.

It is the first ever viable religious conception leading faith to observable consequences which can be tested and judged; a teaching able to demonstrate its own efficacy; the first ever religious claim of knowledge that meets the criteria of verifiable, evidence based truth embodied in action. As such this teaching enters the public domain as a 'religious' reality entirely new to human history.

Believe it or no, check thes links:
http://www.dunwanderinpress.org
http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/1676
http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/1726

In my case, I lack a belief in gods because no evidence has thus far been presented to compel me to believe that gods exist. For me, atheism is not an end in itself but rather is merely a side effect of a scientific view of what (theistic) religions are and how they came into existence. The evidence favours the view that gods are mythic ideas mistakenly believed (or falsely asserted) to be facts, rather than credible factual statements about real states of the world.

John Burnside (JB) wrote:

"As often as not, atheists are not that easy to distinguish from the Christian, Jewish or Muslim fundamentalists they so thoroughly detest: we find in both the same immovable conviction, the same dreary ardour."

An atheist's lack of belief in god is not "immovable." Present me with physical evidence that god exists as more than just an idea in people's heads and I will definitely consider changing my position.

JB presents no statistical evidence that atheists are "as often as not" indistinguishable from religious fundamentalists, nor does he present evidence that atheists "thoroughly detest" such fundamentalists. I don't necessarily dislike fundamentalists, just those who today wish to force their views down the throats of others through violence, threats, intimidation, and through harsh penalties for criticizing the religion or for apostatizing, etc. In those cases, it is not the fact that they are "fundamentalists" that bothers me, but rather that they are dangerous criminals who threaten people's safety and freedoms. JB presents no evidence that atheists today exhibit the same violence and coercion specifically in the name of atheism. That is not to say that there are no atheists doing that. But he must present evidence, statistics, that atheists are using such violence and coercion specifically to impose their views to the same extent as certain religious "fundamentalists"--otherwise th