I think there is plenty of arrogance to go around in these debates. The arrogance of the theist community is pretty simple to grasp - how can you not be arrogant when you have the creator of both the universe and your personal moral code on your side. That's why, as an atheist, I've never really understood the shows of tolerance between the Abrahamic religions, because at their heart they each consign all the members of the others to hell in the afterlife. However you feel as an individual member of that faith, no matter how tolerant you are, as a member of one of these faiths you do belong to a faith that says you are going up and anyone who believes anything else is going down - they all have this as a central tenet.

There is also arrogance on my side. Once I adopt a scientific/rationalist perspective that requires you to prove propositions, holy books don't have much to say. They are clearly time-bound works, and all of them make specific claims about the natural world which are demonstrably false. The attempts of Christians and members of other faiths to "prove" the scientific validity of their holy books can't help but look childish and ridiculous to a person driven by reason, and outright assaults on reason and established scientific truth like the Creation Museum just make me want to throw up - sorry, can't even begin to hide my revulsion. I don't think any book professing to be the timeless word of god should have any demonstrably false claims. Aside from that, I've studied all the holy books, and have found them all morally lacking. Just one illustrative example: the bible has many opportunities to condemn slavery, as Sam Harris points out, but it doesn't. It instead gives instructions on how to be a responsible Christian slaveholder and a meek and obedient Christian slave. Now I know there aren't any Christians on this thread that condone slavery. But what I am saying is this moral evolution (yes, we are morally evolving - those pesky facts once again establish that there is a steady decline throughout human history in violent death, through all wars and pograms worldwide) on their part has come outside of their holy book, which inexplicably fails to take a stand on an unarguably important point. And a detrimental silence, seeing as how many southern slaveholders used these passages from the bible to justify their positions. But all arguments aside, religious people think I'm wrong and going to hell, and I think they're basing their morality on a factually wrong and morally deficient text - you can dress those positions up any way you want but they are, I believe, inherently arrogant toward one another. I'm not sure you can, by some trick of polite discourse, turn them into something other than that.

Before anyone calls me a neocon: I have always been against the Iraq war, since well before we went. I believe we cannot convert muslims, or anyone, to democracy at gunpoint and favor an immediate withdrawal, an apology, funds, and our help setting up the most US hating government they want, as long as it's freely elected.

Finally, and I apologize for the length of this post, but I have couple short concluding points. First, atheists are one of the least monolithic groups imaginable. Any attempt to characterize them, INCLUDING MINE, collapses in the face of specifics, as I know there are atheists who at least obey the forms of absolute respect for religion at all times. We may generalize more, slightly more, about religious people because they all claim to be rooted in a specific ideology, which is grounded in a text they all refer to. But in the final analysis, who really cares about arrogance anyway? These are key arguments about the assumptions we carry into the world, isn't the important thing to find out who is right?

So we're supposed to trust these unnaccountable elites, or at least not blindly attack them. They have contempt for issues of national sovereignty, use their power and international status to enrich themselves to the detriment of others, but they're still the best we can hope for. Hey, sometimes they talk about the rest of us, about what they can do to end poverty, so it's not as if they don't care about us at all!

Increasingly, we live in a world where there are people who have grown so powerful that their power cannot be taken away. In a real sense, I think this means that there are powerful, selfish people with absolutely no accountability. The argument of market forces and shareholders do not apply, as they are so powerful that the most awful tragedies are mere inconveniences for them. Country won't dismantle it's regulations to your satisfaction? They won't break the unions for you? Just move somewhere else. Shareholder revolt? First, this doesn't happen with any regularity. Second, in the unlikely event that any of these plutocrats was successfully called to order on one of their business interests, they could just sell that company and buy another, one with more compliant investors who will STFU and let them do their robber baron thing.

The democratic institutions which fight these people, the odd independent news source and trade unions, are local and national in scope and lack the resources to fight these huge, obnoxiously well funded international entities. Governments, especially weaker ones more prone to corruption, are easy targets for corporate giants. Honestly, if every regulatory agency in this supposedly robust democracy is fronted by a corporate lackey, what chance does Thailand have?

But we should just quietly submit to the wisdom of these people. We should not blindly attack them. So I conclude, Baa!