The point is that there's nothing particularly daring or insightful about what Dawkins et al. are doing.

I'm not sure that the adjectives most of us were applying were "daring" or "insightful" so much as "correct."

Which brings us right back to the inescapable conclusion that Dawkins et al. are the oppressors, not the oppressed. You're not allowed to believe what you want to believe, even if you're not hurting anyone else.

You have a very interesting definition of "oppression" and "allowed." You say Dawkins is an oppressor. I don't think so. Does the fact that your statement contradicts my belief make you my oppressor? Am I not allowed to believe that Dawkins is not an oppressor now that you've said it? I'm pretty sure this whole thing was just you stating your opinion in a public forum, but if I'm missing something about the power dynamic here, please let me know.

Yes, and it is for you too. If someone makes a claim that unobservable unicorns exist, I have to take it on faith that they do not, in fact, exist.

That definition of "faith" seems to be so diluted that there is almost no reason to keep the word around, at least for the purposes of this debate. To take it to mean, "lack of 100% certainty" is fine in the general case, but I see it here being used as a cudgel to knock down all ideas as being equally likely. It usually goes something like this:

Person A: A million years ago, I created Jupiter and all of its moons out of pudding.
Person B: I suppose anything is possible, but I'm not going to take that on faith. It sound crazy. I need some evidence.
Person A: Well, you take it on faith that your wife and children aren't being eaten and regurgitated by goblins every night without your knowledge. Why can't you take my thing on faith too?

I think that Russell had it pretty dead on when he said, "When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others." The claim, "Well, you empiricists take stuff on faith too!" is pretty weak tea when your definition of "faith" is "100% certainty minus epsilon."

Peer-reviewed, supporting in its evidence a rather restricted subset of religion's whose after-death predictions are what is experienced.

After-death "predictions" or observations of what near death experiences are like which are then later turned into religious stories? It's like saying that Helios is real because the Greeks predicted that he would ride his chariot across the sky--a prediction supported by the fact that the sun traverses our sky daily.

Of course, rational argument isn't going to lever anyone out of religious beliefs, so maybe this kind of jazz is what is needed to break religion's stranglehold on public policy.

I think that this is more important than a lot of people realize. A big part of it is seeing that a critical mass of people are willing to publicly say that they don't believe this stuff. The reports of a "rise" in atheism probably reflect a small number of "converts" and a very large number of people who have never believed in gods but who have kept their heads down because that's what the culture requires.

Imagine a society that throws virgins and infidels into a volcano. Then imagine that nobody in that society actually belives it does any good, but everybody stays quiet because they think they're the only ones and that saying something is a good way to get tossed into the volcano. In that case, I'm happy for anybody who expands the range of acceptable opinion, no matter how they do it.

There seem to be a lot of people out here who think that all things that are unprovable or uncertain are equally likely. I can't prove it, but I don't think that's the case.

So ideas are only worth spreading if you spread them to people who will execute you on the spot for them? I'd be happy to teach calculus to people, but I don't think I'd be willing to get shot for it. Pretty sure that has no bearing on whether calculus is good or whether teaching it is a useful pursuit.

Really? So I assume that you either don't believe in a god or that the god you choose to believe in is a complete no-op. He doesn't do things like dump these things on you and expect you to obey, right? Or tell you to slaughter folks? In that case, I can certainly see being totally willing to ignore questions of actual existence and just assume. I mean, I couldn't care less about gods who don't have any effect on the real world.

But a lot of gods seem to want their followers to do stuff that they might not otherwise do. In a case like that, a good sanity check like, "Am I doing this in the name of Grand Cosmic Righteousness or because of voices in my head?" seems totally appropriate.

Many, previously non-religious people - atheists and agnostics alike - have had religious or supernatural experiences that they lack the ability to explain.

What's telling is that if it shifts them toward religion, it almost always steers them to the religion most generally accepted in the culture they grew up in. That's pretty strong evidence that it's still very much a "because somebody said this" phenomenon and not a revelation of some deep universal truth.

I have no interest in proving whether God does or doesn't exist. But why does it matter?

If God is telling me what to do and what not to do, the question of whether or not God exists seems pretty important.

You do not have the right "Not to be offended"...

Apparently you do, but only if you're in the religious voting majority.

If the experience of Europe is any indication it will have little positive effect, but will offer American gays and lesbians a chance to participate in the expense, pain, and acrimony of divorce.

"Little positive" for you and me maybe, but I'm pretty sure that the people who weren't able to get married would probably see something positive in it. I'm glad to see that over the years the goalposts have moved from, "Gay marriage will cause plagues of locusts and give us all Dutch elm disease," to, "Well, gay marriage won't cure cancer."

Would you favor abolishing marriage in general in order to save us all from the acrimony of divorce?

The rough definition of the "intrinsic value" of an item is the value you (a person) would place on it when "I can trade it for something else" is not part of the valuation process. It's not some physical constant, and it was never implied to be.

I did read the article. I'm not sure how the point "The Chinese have a lot more people than we do" is negated by pointing out that the phenomenon is really, "The Chinese + the populations of a bunch of other nations." That just makes the point even more true. We can become marginally more productive or more educated than we are, but we're never going to do so as fast as country of uneducated farmers sending their first generation of kids to newly-built engineering schools. The bottom line is that we're about 4.5% of the world's population (and falling) and we're producing 21% of the academic papers. There's simply no possible way for that to continue while the rest of the world develops. Assuming our percentage of the world's population stays the same (and it won't), I'd expect us to asymptotically approach 4.5% of the world's papers even with top notch academics.

I'm all for more R&D funding as a percentage of GDP, but again, "growth in R&D funding as a percentage of GDP" is a questionable metric to compare to developing nations. What percentage of South Korea's GDP was spent on R&D 50 years ago compared to ours? What is it now compared to ours? Should ours have grown at the same rate as theirs? Probably not.

The thing is, we should be losing ground by metrics like "absolute number of scientific papers produced." China has 4 times as many people as we do and is in the process of increasing the percentage of its population that gets advanced education and participates in the industrial economy. China surpassing the US in papers produced is inevitable. They'll do it as soon as they're 1/4th as academically productive per capita as we are. Or, stated differently, we would have to remain permanently 4x as productive as the Chinese to stay ahead forever. Not going to happen.

In effect you're saying the US is little better than a banana republic, where the public officials (and therefore laws) are for sale, and if you have enough money you can have whatever you want.

Yes and no. In a real banana republic situation, you can't get rid of your corrupt lawmakers even if they're doing thing that the majority absolutely hates. The corruption is so ingrained that elections are basically meaningless. In a functioning democracy, you get voted out if you're doing something offensive enough that the public notices and considers it bad enough to override whatever reasons they had for voting you in to begin with. As long as the corruption you engage in is esoteric or small scale enough that the public doesn't notice or care enough to remove you, you can get away with it in any democracy. Tweaking the auto sales distribution rules probably qualifies.