MaNiK_JoSiAh,
I try my very best not to be offensive. However, I am prepared to accept that any statement that is critical of belief will inevitably be offensive to some. So I apologise in advance.

My problem is simple. The idea that there is an old man in the sky or some equivalent body directing affairs on earth is laughable in the extreme. It matters little to me if the God figure is male or female; young or old; single or pleural; aided by a committee; has numerous assistances such as angels, archangels, or whatever; the idea is just preposterous. Nor do I care much for the concept of an abstract God who invented the laws of physics before going into permanent retirement.

Put it another way, if I said to you that there were fairies at the bottom of my garden. I am sure you would say that that I was telling fibs.

On the other hand an empirical and pragmatic approach to life works for me. I regard the so called great as questions as being essentially unanswerable. For example: “What is the purpose of life? Where do we come from etc?. In brief the subject of eschatology is to me meaningless and of no great importance.

Thanks anti-green, there is no offense taken. This is a fair defense of your beliefs.

To render the great questions of life unanswerable seems to suggest that what you believe is possibly agnosticism, and not atheism (when we take the pure definitions). That is, you cannot state absolutely that there is no God. However, you do not believe that there is enough evidence to support the existence of God. This is an important distinction, as one is an absolute statement and one is not.

I'm glad you either excused my hyperbole or took it for what it was in my response to TR. There is some substance in it.

It is best to let them go on thinking that the things you value don't exist. They really don't want the truth. They punish people who alarm them. So why have this impulse to force the whole story on them. The only real problem with all this, is that in order to protect them and uphold your values, you can eventually end not believing a word you say; until finally you come to the realization that the truth, and your truth is especially what they find themselves in denial of, for they fear it most next to death, life, and living -fear of God.

Unknown

The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.

Carl Jung

To one & all,
A couple of writers have raised the issue of “respect.”
Does respect encompass censoring novels, cartoons or even scientific theories that some/many believers many find offensive/disrespectful?

TR
Correction: Sorry for the silly sentence (I was not allowed to post a correction until now). Please read “you should respect the fact that this or that religion, or ethnicity or political preferences etc. are part of some people’s intellectual and emotional makeup.”

instead of

”you should treat with reverence people for whom this or that religion, or ethnicity or political preferences etc. are part of their intellectual and emotional makeup.”

anti-green
As MaNiK_JoSiAh says, the last paragraph is a fair statement about your beliefs. However, what you list as your problem is a list of simplifications. It would be fair to admit that for an educated e.g. Chrtistian also the rational reasons behing his/her beliefs are more sophisticated. I can tell you that people who dislike mathematics usually harbour very naive ideas on what mathematics is all about. Something similar with belief in a Reality (called simply God) that can be reached neither directly through observations independent of the observer’s mind, nor indirectly through theories written in the language of mathematics, the reason being precisely this personal involvement of the "observer", his/her mind, (education, cultural background, emotions, etc.).

Tangential to Horus's comment.

There appears to be a core construct for the appeasers; the ones who believe that mass hysteria is in operation and it has been born of low intellect and bigotry which ipso facto greatly exaggerates the threat to pluralism.

The construct being that Aussies are such congenial, highly evolved beings that it is unthinkable that large numbers of down trodden, fanatically religious Luddites with criminal mindsets believe that we are akin to cockroaches and need to be crushed. Not to mention that they are also willing to crush a significant number of their brethren in the process.

It is unlikely that the menace will be adequately addressed if an influential elite continue to assert that there is no 'real' threat.

But consider the downside if the appeasers are wrong -- Socio-economic catastrophe results. In comparison, if the alarmists are wrong what is the downside? Very little, except the creation of a thriving security industry and a religious group with an even bigger chip on their shoulder than they previously had.

There is of course the concerns about civil liberties, but if you believe George Soros and a couple of mates were behind 9/11 then the loss of said liberties logically follows.