Hi Peeps

[Markos]

Well I spose I'll give you a shot despite this sentence of yours:

Jesus is much more interesting, as are real atheists with bite (i.e. those who have got beyond the monotonous mantra of "evidence, evidence").

My only thought is this: Wouldn't it be a pathetic world of ours if everybody just gave up on evidence and we all believed any wild claim that came out of some lunatics mouth? To put it another way .... How nice it would be for Muslims if Christians suddenly stopped giving them "evidence" of the divinity of Jesus Christ.

You speak as if the only alternative to repeatedly asking for evidence (that is, evidence that is sufficient to meet one's own particular standards for the truth claim in question) is to end all discourse by blindly accepting any old claim for no reason whatsoever. Why? Aren't they equally clumsy and dull ways to seek truth? Aren't the methods we apply in the natural sciences, just to give one example, so much more profound and complicated than merely one party asking another for evidence? Yet many people - not least on this forum, with fundamentalists on both sides - act as if all one needs to do to "win" an argument is to apply that lethal hammer blow "The Scientific Method" (as if such a thing exists).