In which case I clearly need to woosh myself...

If you think I think YHWH is benevolent then you have inferred a lot from a very short statement. YHWH is by most accounts one of the worst entities in fiction responsible for genocide, torture and poor taste in sea food.

Depends, Dick could be an expert philosopher who has supporting arguments for why any creator deity is likely to be benevolent. Most natural theologians will provide you with such arguments to back up their particular deity. You are judging his argument without knowing it in detail. It could be the case that he is making an error by conflating deities with benevolent deities, or it could be that he has an argument for why any deity would by definition be good (if you want an example consider the Christian conception of ethics as being a reflection of gods nature, making god good by definition).

"Would a benevolent deity unfailingly override the poor decisions made by humans?" - Doesn't need to. Just has to fail to do it once when it would be desirable for them to do so and possible for them to do so. Dick judges that he has encountered one such incidence which is sufficient to rule out those deities. You might argue he has put his line in the sand as to what constitutes too much suffering and evil in a poor place, but I don't suggest making that argument to veterans faces unless you yourself have watched comrades slowly bleed to death while you pick bits of shrapnel out your legs.

Your request is obviously daft. Collections of atoms behaving as though they have free will is exactly what we would expect if the materialists are right. That is the point, a universe with conciousness and free will looks no bloody different to one without. That is precisely why they are spurious concepts. As far as us to "evenly distribute [our] time between barking, shrieking, silence, and speaking", asking someone without free will to exercise free will to prove their point is just absurd.

But not orthogonal to the question of if there are benevolent deities.

"It's a great user interface from the user's point of view, but a really terrible system to have."

I feel as though you are attacking our banking system somehow...

He said 70, not 7.

It's Britain. We're used to terrorism. I remember after the 7/7 bombings one of the more popular jokes in the immediate aftermath was 'so Al Qaeda made the underground late, Ken Livingstone has been doing that for years and he doesn't even need bombs.'. Honestly I'm amazed no one offered these guys a cup of tea.

No, and neither would you, because the US doesn't have a left wing crazy with any hope of winning. The left in the US has some real idiots (Hi everyone who graduated from Berkeley!) but you go ahead and try to tell me that there will ever be a member of the US senate who could be described as communist the way some of the senate could be described as corporatist or fascist. The US has a stupid left, and the stupid portions of the left in the US spend most of their time attacking each other so that they don't get in, it doesn't have a effective radical left like say Italy or France.

I don't understand your example. If it was an attempt to argue by analogy you would be better served to give a clear example where atheism was a motivating factor. Please be careful no to confuse anti-theism (which I'm happy to admit can motivate people to do things) with atheism (which I claim rarely can). Note that it isn't enough for someone to claim they are doing something for a reason, they have to actually be doing it for that reason. The Reign of Terror was done in the name of justice and reason, but no one is insane enough to suggest that justice or reason caused the Reign of Terror.
I'm not deceiving myself. I'm just not confusing atheism with anti-theism. There is no gospel of atheism, and I hope that is just a poorly chosen rhetorical device. Many Christians tie Thomist notions to Christianity, but Thomism is not Christianity and if someone tried to suggest that Christianity implied Thomism I'd call bullshit on them just like I'm going to have to call bullshit on you here. Atheism is not anti-theism.
Anti-theism has indeed played the same role as religion in some historical atrocities. Many of it's adherents have been organised and used violence. But you are confusing a tertiary concern (lack of belief in deities) for the primary one (dislike of organised religion). I say this as someone who is an anti-theist so it isn't like I'd dodging criticism of my beliefs here, I'm just pointing that you are going after the wrong ideal. But you seem to think atheism either is anti-theism, or implies it. It isn't and it doesn't. If it were perspectives like my own about religion would be far more popular with non-believers than they are.

No, no it hasn't. Many religious people are quick to point out that philosophically speaking atheist has very little to offer. Not being compelled to a belief in god is not a motivator. Believers are correct in this regard, weak atheism will not tell you much about the world and it does not really do anything for you. For a start purely descriptive statements cannot alone act as a motivators. As such it cant be the cause of very much.
Communism, capitalism, imperialism are all complex beliefs with implications, screw up how you apply them and they can cause you to be a douche. Atheism isn't really as ism at all, we only label it as such because historically religious belief is so common we needed a word to describe not having one.
This is not to say there weren't atheists who happened to assholes ("Hi Stalin!"). But they weren't assholes because they were atheists. Because they were communists, or socialists, or fascists, or conservative, or liberal, or any number of other justifications for actions, sure, but not because they were atheists. Because atheism offers virtually nothing by way of imperative.
You want to warn me of the dangers of my politics because I'm a liberal, a social democrat, a believer in democracy, have at it dude. Plenty of very bad things have been done as a direct result of those ideals and I'm all for being careful applying them. But you are being disingenuous when you say religion was used as an excuse, just like I would be disingenuous if I claimed the reign of terror had nothing to do with radical liberalism. Religion can cause strife, any ideology can cause strife. It isn't just an excuse, it is part of a complex system of causes.

Positive atheism is not exclusive with being 'sensible' and can be perfectly reasonable and rational. Many, if not most conceptions of a divinity are inherently self-contradictory and one can provide good arguments for why they do not exist. As an example consider that the God implied by the Kalam Cosmological argument is impossible if any exist definition of 'cause' is used when describing the cause of the universe (a efficient without material cause is contrary to all experience, a required event before another required event makes no sense in a atemporal setting). It is perfectly reasonable to take some or a few of the more common but contradictory conceptions of a deity or deity and assert they do not exist by looking at how they are self contradictory. Non-existence of contradictory being is as close to an objective fact as scientific truth or anything else we label as 'fact'. And those are the deist gods, showing that the gods of specific religions do not exist is child's play.

Positive atheism is not the same thing as believing that all believers are insane. I can think you are wrong without thinking you are a nut job. Besides insanity is a moral judgement (it amounts to asserting how a mind 'should' work, whatever that means) and I've no interest in passing moral judgement, just describing what is.

Give me a sufficiently fleshed out commonly used definition of god and I will probably have an argument why such a being is impossible. Given that many theists are unwilling to define god I define it for them as "an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient being who is the cause of the universe". On this, or any similar definition I can show this deity does not exist. It might be the problem of evil, or the problem of unbelief, or something like the one I gave above. If not then you and I are simply defining god differently and I'm happy to say I'm a weak atheist on your definition. I'm likely to also point out your definition is so vague as to have no implications what-so-ever of course, but that doesn't change the fact that with respect to it I am not a strong atheist.

Are there atheists like you describe? Sure, there are a couple of assholes. And yes they pretty much have a religion. But you are conflating this religion with strong atheism, and that simply isn't the case. My own existence acts as a refutation.

Agreed.

While I agree with your sentiment I have a slightly different take. As you suggest there really isn't 'paying each other back' in international relations, but the US is a good ally to have, with capable armed forces and I will acknowledge that it is only because of US support that Western Europe did not end up if not occupied by the Soviets then certainly strongly within the Soviet sphere of influence. For that I am thankful to the US and the citizens who paid to keep us safe.
That said US foreign policy is generally speaking a disaster, and not just under Bush. Not because it is too interventionist, I don't subscribe to the Berkely school of 'everything the US ever does abroad is always wrong'. It is a disaster because they pretend to be engaged in realpolitik when they really aren't, or at least are doing it very wrong. Realpolitik in the US seems to mean propping us corporate interests and right wing governments at the expense of democracy and social freedoms. Every once in a while this works (South Korea for instance) because reasonable economic conditions result in an expanding middle class who then demand democracy and social freedoms. But usually what you get is some asshole dictator whose corrupt government squanders any and all gains from having economic freedom. At the same time the US gets the reputation of propping up yet another dictator or of trying to overthrow a nominal democracy.
Venezuela is a good example of the failures of this pollice. Chavez was an idiot and an arsehole. If the US hadn't made him seem under siege he would have been out of office by now. His policies were stupid and Venezuela, while not exactly a paragon of democracy, was democratic enough that it almost certainly would have replaced him. But the US had to strengthen his hand by supporting a coup that was never going to work.
Now this is not to say your point about Europe basically fucking up the entire world isn't a fair cop. Heck I'm British, the TV new could basically be renamed 'a list of places Britain fucked up in some way' and it wouldn't be misleading. And if it wasn't us it was the Belgians or the French or the Spanish or in a few cases the Germans. But while this is a fair cop the scale at which Europe is fucking up right now is generally speaking smaller, partly because we just don't have the resources to fuck up on a grand scale any more.
That said it isn't always easy, and sometimes people are going to accuse you of fucking up even when you do the right thing. Take Libya for instance. The US was instrumental in giving Libya a chance for freedom. In my opinion the US did the right thing there. They prevented what would have been termed 'the rape of Bengahzi' for a start. Even if we end up with a Jihadi state or some fascist dictator I still think the US did the right thing because international politics isn't easy. Same with the early stages of Vietnam before it became obvious the government in the South wasn't going to get it's act together and that the North would win.
When the US fights for economic and social freedom it is a force for good in the world, and it is doing the right thing, even if it doesn't succeed. The problem is that often the US isn't fighting for these things, especially when the CIA is involved. Often the US is fighting not for justice, freedom and democracy, but for corporate interests or out of fear of the latest bogeyman.
Basically what I'm saying is the US need to have more confidence in its ideals.

How is that purpose in any way objective? What thing is it a property of?