No rational case for God = increasingly desperate attacks on atheists

[Mudhammam]

He was a Professor of European Though at the London School of Economics before retirement, he is no intellectual lightweight and I would be inclined to check his sources before laughing at him, he has a tendency to be right.

Perhaps you have a little too much faith in Gray. Of course religion is still influential in the US but you're distracting from the claim, which is that we're no less secular today than we were 150 years ago. Do we really have to go into this and start listing the differences between now and then and the progress that has been made in diminishing the influence of religion in the public sphere? (And don't twist my words into saying there's not still a tremendous amount of work to be done).

Example: No one is beaten, put to death, or put in prison for being a homosexual anymore. But I'm sure that has nothing to do with secularism, right?

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I don't disagree with anything you've said, Simon. But I do think it is okay to criticize the minority atheist view that gods do not exist. There are plenty of 7's around and many of these seem to suffer from the same debilitating symptoms of fundamentalism as their theist counterparts.

A 7 is a person who claims to KNOW there are no such things as unicorns, leprechauns, garden faeries, or supermen/gods in reality? And you're claiming these people are on par with those who say, "I know Jesus is God and that he will come back to rapture the church" or "I know there is one God and Muhammad is his prophet?"

That's ridiculous. Even the atheist who claims to know there is no god in the same way they know the moon is not made of cheese is on much firmer ground to make that assertion than any believer has EVER been.