Very well said "bushbasher" and "wobbles". This whole business of trying to force the discussion into a paradigm of "one religion vs another" is disingenous at best, and otherwise quite simply dishonest.

It is only those on one side of this "debate" who believe in an imaginary friend.

By definition God or the spirit are not of the physical world. Bit hard to prove one way or the other. We can measure the manifestations of life all we want, but this is not measuring 'life' in the religious sense.

The idea that life is somehow not quite a tangible thing has been with us across cultures and across time; and is not about to go away. Ultimately science and religion are both about the same sort of answers.

Good luck in your strivings people, and have a great Xmas and New Year.

It remains up to those who profess that there is a God to prove their claim. If their claim is based on Jesus a man who lived more like a socialist than a capitalist and challenged the leadership of the church. It is merely a hangover from the days of superstition the bible cannot be legitimized in science, it could well be a book of fairy tales.

The greatest achievements are made by man and until the churches can prove there is a god I suggest the churches are merely businesses making huge profits from selling hope and fear.

I think a lot of the folks on this thread are barking up the wrong tree. Gray isn't a Christian (as far as I can discern) and his ideological position is rather slippery. He criticises widely, but he doesn't seem to offer much of an alternative. He criticises atheism, but doesn't endorse Christianity per se, merely diagreeing that when "the world is rid of religion, immemorial evils such as war and tyranny can be overcome, and humanity will be able to fashion a new life for itself better than any known in history."

I can't disagree with Gray's basic tenet, that atheism holds no promise, in itself, of improving humanity. That doesn't mean that I believe that Christianity fulfills its promise of ending war and tyranny. The Crusades, the Inquisition, Franco's Spain or Ngo Dinh Diem's Vietnam (to pull just a few samples from the grab-bag of history) suggest Christianity has not solved our problems, even when professed Christians are in charge.

Gray seems to be setting up Dawkins et al as strawmen. His position seems to boil down to advocating introspection to temper strident ideologies. It's a sensible argument, but I'm not sure it leads us anywhere useful. Surely reasonable people already believe in self-examination? It's the unreasonable ones we need to be wary of.

I agree with Ho Hum that the article is saying little of substance. But I would like to question some of the posters.

Ubique,
You speak of the atheists that were hunted to death for many hundreds of years. Could you be a bit more specific if I’m not expected to think that you are making fuzzy and indiscriminate generalisations. Who are you referring to? Could you suggest some names or perhaps some places or times eras?

Wobbles,
You have alleged that parts of the New Testament have been altered so as to put into question the integrity of the texts that have been passed down to us.

This would be news to the scholars. The New Testament is without doubt the most analysed and scrutinised collection of literature of all antiquity or perhaps any era. If you know of where these documents may have been altered, could you specify by who or when this may have happened, or are you just throwing mud at the wall?

I was taught by some great thinkers at LSE. Perhaps this less-learned professor seeks to demonstrate by his example that there can be regress as well as progress, something which few would deny. As for saying that "This idea of progress is a post-Christian myth," the Prof seems to have no knowledge of, for example, much earlier Indian and Greek thought. A fail at undergraduate level, perhaps it's his (or the SMH's) estimate of the level of the SMH reader.