Sheesh...Daniel in the Lion's Den - well you will be ensured your safe passage in God's Kingdom never a truer martyr there ever was.

Please...is there no shame or honour left anymore. Some Christians just make this stuff up as they go along. Even Cardinal Pell declared the other day that even atheists go to heaven. When did that happen after all that hellfire and holywater nonsense. We all know there is symbolism in religion but what some Church leaders don't realise that some people actually believe it.

It never ceases to amaze the lengths to which some Christians go in attempting to demonise atheists.

Thankfully most Christians are not like this.

If you are so sure of your own choices why the need to be so divisive?

Same goes for the atheists who think banning religion is a good thing. Why not let each person choose their own path, let's face it humans share more common goals than not, most people do want to do unto others.

And those who for some reason, come from a wide variety of backgrounds, including believers.

There is no time in history, unlike the author wishes to convey, where there were not 'sinful' acts including those periods where Christian dominance meant death and destruction to those who did not conform. Where the Catholic Church not only gave pedophiles immunity by inaction but moved them from one parish to another. Look what happens in countries where Islam dominates. Dominating religious power mongers never work for the good of all only their own causes.

Concentrations of power don't work in free societies. The move to a more universal secular humanist approach is the only way ahead allowing all of us to hold precious our freedoms of belief as long as they cause no harm to others.

I cannot see how some militant Christians or atheists can argue otherwise. It is not all about you.

What is it about Christians that, when someone shouts “bottom of the hole”, they all start digging?

David, this was an Atheists Convention. There are some 34,000 registered religions on the planet and what is it you contribute? You to try to turn atheism into another religion.

Is there something so difficult about irony that makes it impossible for you to observe it?

It really is time for you to leave our medieval values behind and move into the 21st Century.

Start with leaving these behind;

-the divine right of egotistical kings
-the inferiority of women
-the idea that a wise State knows all
-the idea that the individual is always right
-the bitter-sweet addiction, that transforms a doctrine from a mere model into something sacred and worth killing for.

WmTrevor

'In the hope of something new, I'll repeat my request for you to nominate where and when in human history society functioned and people behaved in ways acceptable to you. '

You ask the wrong question. The good of society is far more important than what I consider acceptable to me. I am far more likely than the atheist to accept human limitations and sin. It is natural for man to sin because he is a sinner. History abounds with wars, immorality, murders, deceit for the religous and non religous alike. One however would be totally blind not to see that societies that value life, promote wholesome relationships and display compassion do far better than those that don't. The dogmas of atheism produce none of this fruit though it pretends otherwise.

On a personal level I don't care if the next door neighbours have orgies every night. On another level I want my kids and grandkids to grow up in a society that does not use pseudo science to justify every evil under the sun. If they are going to commit evil which everyone does to a degree they need to call it evil which is something many fundamentalist atheist are only able to attribute to Christianity. Only fools deny the link between pornography and child abuse/rape, the link between fatherless kids and crime, the link between feminism and family breakdown, the link between Islam and terrorism and yet the best atheist can come up with is worn out dogma.

"In the hope of something new, I'll repeat my request for you to nominate where and when in human history society functioned and people behaved in ways acceptable to you."

I second this! Should be interesting. I've always imagined runner as a grumpy old man with a 'keep off the grass' sign in his front yard.

Some initial thoughts on your article:

1. There are multiple offences of 'assertions without evidence', including: "We have unprecedented crime levels". The issue of crime is deceptively complex, but I can safely assert that crime levels in western democracies are falling (you can read the abstract to this article http://bit.ly/J4PxrG and do your own research). Unsubstantiated and incorrect claims like this undermine your thesis. What if I, as an atheist, now made the claim that in direct correlation with the falling crime rates, we have seen rising atheism? Surely this is evidence of the power of atheism to reduce crime?! Let me make your argument for you. Correlation does not equal causation, and the factors that influence crime are complex and inter-related and include social, economic, historic, cultural and religion or lack thereof may or may not have an impact.

2. Conflation of the apparent good that belief in a higher power may offer with evidence for god and support for religion. Your story of the religious placebo offered the dying man argued that the religious ritual made him feel better. The logic that believing in god is better than not believing in god because it makes you feel better is essentially Pascal's wager, which has previously been dismissed, although I am happy to argue it again if you wish. It also makes no arguments for the authenticity of said god or religion.

3. Misunderstanding of atheism and consequent misunderstanding of the issue of using public money to support private faith. Atheism is not a belief system - it makes the simple statement that there is no god. So atheists "going into schools to teach atheism" is simply silly. The main issue is the spending of public money to support the teaching of private beliefs. Religions in Australia get significant tax benefits and financial support, including the school chaplaincy program. I will end with a question: without the financial support offered by the taxpayers, both now and historically, do you think religious organisations would be able to work as they do?

Runner
I know this is throwing good money after bad but I just have to have one more go at helping you to understand WmTrev's challenge.
Remember that when you cited David Palmer's statement, "IN THE 1960’S (emphases added) we had the cultural revolution which brought with it cohabitation, no fault divorce, freely available abortion ... We live in a society today with multiple broken relationships, failed marriages, children being fought over, boys without fathers modelling what it is to grow into manhood. We have unprecedented crime levels …", you went on to explain to us dummies that, "… the dogmas of the humanist fed the sinful nature CREATING these problems."
Now — please stay with me on this — when you say (as you repeatedly do) that all of these problems have been CREATED by humanists and others in recent times, you are necessarily saying that there was a time when these problems did not exist. Or, as WmTrev put it, a time when "society functioned and people behaved in ways acceptable to you."
All WmTrev is asking you to do, and he's asking you very nicely, is to tell us all when and where that was. Here's a hint: from what David Palmer said, it must have been before the 1960s. Here's another: if you cannot come up with a time and a place when society was the way you think it should be( ie little or no sin), then you'll just have to drop your argument that modern woes have been caused by modern, rational thinking