'I daily entertain the possibility that I could be wrong about everything I know, and I am quite confident that even were that the case, I should still continue to live, think, and believe the way I do for the benefit of myself and the world.'

I'm an atheist. I don't find the suspicion that atheists are one good debating point away from murdering everyone in their beds offensive, I find it bizarre.

You've just said it yourself ... it's *not* your faith stopping you.

A thought experiment I like: if you think the universe is theistic ... how would it look or feel if it suddenly became atheistic? What if God vanished for a day, say? Would you act differently? Would physics? Would the sun still come up? Would murdering a nun still be a bad/immoral thing to do?

My guess is that you do nice things because you're nice and want to live somewhere nice. It's more complicated than that, of course, but that's basically it, surely?

What's the basis of my morality? It's the same as everyone else's: for society to function there has to be an accommodation and a set of rules, formal and informal. Many of basics of those are the same for animals as people. Ducks pair-bond for life, apparently, without needing a Catholic priest involved. They punish rapists, too, without recourse to Sharia law. I don't know where they stand on gay marriage.

The modern world has kept all the sensible stuff like not killing people, ditched all the stuff about stoning people who wash their sheep when there's a full moon. More to the point, we've progressed. Dawkins' atheist materialist DNA and evolution inspired attitude to the higher primates (be nice to apes and monkeys, they're almost us) is *infinitely* more positive and 'moral' than the Biblical command to terrorize them because we're special. Jesus could have freed the slaves, instead he endorsed slavery. Wilberforce 1, Jesus 0.

If people need a focus, or something to hang their own personal beliefs on, then ... well, OK. But morality doesn't 'originate' in religion or the religious impulse. It originates because there's more than one of us.

Ourselves. Duh.

We have freedom of speech, and fora where we can exercise it. Ordinary citizens can criticize the leaders without fear of punishment.

The point of freedom of speech is that by allowing *all* forms of speech, it demonstrates its own virtue. It forces challenge and comparison. It allows us to adopt and assimilate what does work.

Every single woman in America is free to wear a burqa.

But where science scores is that it doesn't pretend to offer a complete picture.

And that's the contrast to all religion. The fundamentalist versions say 'this is the truth, it's all what this infallible man/book says', and is patently ludicrous, so modern religion has a fantastic sleight of hand: 'it's all what this infallible man man says, but he's not telling' or 'it's all what this infallible book says, but you have to interpret it correctly'. All modern religion is a nicely-packaged, fluffy mystery religion, the sort of cult and secret society the Christians spent the first 1700 years of power hunting down and burning.

Science just isn't involved in that process. It's a system for assessing evidence, that's all. There's not one scientist, ever, who's said 'and this is the complete picture'. Richard Dawkins, say, doesn't think the model we have for evolutionary biology is *complete*, but he does know that the gaps in knowledge don't involve talking snakes and floating zoos.