I myself am agnostic and while I am not anti-faith I am generally anti-religion. It's not the grassroots faith based activities that bother me, but rather when faith turns political and attempts are made to gain power and influence on the basis that one faith is worth more than others. Another bothersome aspect of religions is how they roll up faith, philosophy, culture and politics into one homogeneous monstrosity. The diversity of the human race will result in sharing views on some aspects and differing on others. It is quite possible, for example, for someone to share the philosophy, culture and politics with Christianity while not actually believing in god. It is the church based implication that not believing in god makes one evil that has elicited such knee-jerk anti-religious attitude from the free thinkers.

"His challenge, of course, is nonsense", after which you list some religous based charities. For non-religous charities you've got the red cross, greenpeace, austcare. There's plenty around.

"The failure to recognise the search for meaning ". It is not the search for meaning that is a problem, but rather the dictation of it to the masses.

Cazza, what did you find "unnecessarily vitriolic" about Dawkins book? I found it quite mild.

Perhaps you're perceptions are a bit distorted by the tradition of treating religion with kit gloves. Even temperate critics use far more robust terms than Dawkins does when they criticise opinions in politics, economics, philosophy, even natural science (see the robust terms in which physicists or biologists often debate each other). Yet when someone like Dawkins approaches religious opinions with the same standard of discourse, he's called "vitriolic".

I smell a taboo being broken here...

I am tired of the general public disposition that maintains that there is something special or sacred about religious belief that renders it in a category entirely separate to other forms of irrational belief, such as prejudice or madness. Why is it that people aren’t willing to demand the same level of respect and tolerance for prejudices such as sexism and racism which they demand for religious beliefs, even though the two kinds of beliefs are as irrational as each other?

Richard Dawkins aptly summarised the implications of society’s overweening respect for religion in The God Delusion: “If the advocates of apartheid had their wits about them they would claim – for all I know truthfully – that allowing mixed races is against their religion. A good part of the opposition would respectfully tip toe away. And it is no use claiming that this is an unfair parallel because apartheid has no rational justification. The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’”.

Why is it considered acceptable to go to town on supporters of Pauline Hanson or neo-Nazis; to demonstrate no tolerance or acceptance towards these people whatsoever; to DEMAND that such people justify their irrational prejudices? But with regard to religious beliefs (which are no less irrational than the prejudices of neo-Nazis), we must simply ‘respect’ them. Why? Because they are religious of course!

Clearly, this answer crumbles under the weight of its own absurd hypocrisy.

Oh, and Mr Bowden, I think that if you were to actually read philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, you would find nothing 'gentle' or 'agnostic' about their criticisms of religion whatsoever...

“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands” – Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

“Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think” – Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism.

As much as it is good to see an article pulling the new atheism apart I cannot agree with the author’s central premise: that religion comes from human need of comfort or meaning. Speaking as a Christian theologian this puts the cart before the horse. We believe not because of human need but because a truth as been impressed upon us and for no other reason. O course the faith that comes from this is a comfort but even more it is discomforting. It is so in that it sees that all of our plans for comfort are for nothing and indeed any attempt to secure our lives against any contingency, even meaninglessness, will be shallow idolatry. For out God speaks to us from the future and upsets all of our plans. There is always a great danger in defending religion as though it were all the same, it is the same danger that the atheists fall into that gives them ample reason to discount the lot. In its purity, Christianity is a critique of all religions, any human attempt to grasp the divine. So, sadly, I find that the defence of religion is just the mirror image of its critique.

Peter Sellick

Atticus_the_Lawyer, my objection to Dawkins' book was that, whereas he spent pages and pages describing the appalling things done in the name of religion, he completely failed to address the really good things that people do because of their faith. Just because it doesn't require religion to be a 'good person', you can't conclude that religion never does any good.

I wish I could remember the details, but I heard a very interesting interview with a man who had spent a year living among different community groups in England and, contrary to his expectations (and indeed his goal), found that it was the religious ones who were doing much more to help others.

I am a non-religious person and happy to be called an atheist:

I did smile at a few sentences in Dawkin's God Delusion but generally thought he is biased and tageting where he could sell. Were I reviewing it -I have reviewed business texts and an academic journal- I would be suggesting sifnificant re-writing. A much better book on the Atheist view of how relegious views weas developed and alternative views of the creation given could have been provided by "discipline specialists| writing chapters with Dawkins merely as acting as the directing Editor. I fully agree with Dawkin's general lean but he is not an expert on everything. There were several mistakes and he could have added interesting naterial: the Hewbrews didn't move from polythesism to henothesism [Popkin el al] and Yewah was initially a tribal volcano god of war [Toynbee].

Atheists need to adopt a more investigative approach maintaining and testing tenative hypotheses, as do Theisists. Neither, should preach, rather debate the evidence