What's your opinion on Liberal Religion?

[Alan V]

Third, I did not say that “rational” equals “will agree with me.”  In fact, I said just the reverse.  Many theists are indeed rational.  I just see them as lacking the information which will naturally change their minds if they are indeed rational.

Let me see if I understand you here.

You seem to be saying that you have a crucial bit of information, which every rational religious person in the world lacks. But if they continue to learn they will eventually glean this bit of information, and then they, like you, will not believe in God. 

I am skeptical that you have information which every rational religious person in the world lacks.

Think of it in these terms: before evolutionary theory or the understanding that the sun works by nuclear fusion, theists were in much stronger positions in arguing for design and for the younger age of the universe respectively.  

Now as long as you keep adding more and more of such scientific discoveries, then any God-concept becomes more and more improbable. One example is our modern understanding that the mind is brain-dependent. That makes human immortality and any mind-without-a-brain (gods or God) highly unlikely. Not as many people are as informed about brain science as they are about evolutionary theory or nuclear fusion.

Finally, if you define "knowledge," as I do, in terms of probabilities rather than in the absolute terms of some philosophers (an impossibility in any case), you will see why I have no problem describing my hard atheist position as knowledge.

And of course, it's not just me who has access to such information.  I am rather a late-comer actually, since I only became an atheist at the age of 50, 15 years ago.

In those 15 years, I have consistently argued that many atheists seem to underestimate the amount of scientific information required to really justify their perspectives. I have concluded that most of them, unlike me, never seriously considered taking up the burden of proof. They realized, early on in many cases, that the burden of proof was with whoever asserted the extraordinary claim that God exists.

So all atheists really need to do is to offer more likely explanations for anything which theists think requires God as an explanation, at least to justify atheism as a reasonable position. Theists may still be reasonable, since they offer reasons for what they believe, but the question is whether those offered reasons are the best interpretations of the available information as a whole. We atheists don't think so.

So people can be both reasonable and wrong, depending on their available information.