The Chinese government is also comprised of non-alchemists. Will alchemy save Tibet?

One may be an atheist and be a fascist, a sociopath, a sadist and all kinds of unpleasant things. Atheism is just the denial of something.

I took "atheist" in this contest to be "new atheist" which implies "secular humanist."

The "New Atheists" are often accused of treating religion in a simpleminded way and being "fundamentalist" in their approach to Christianity, Islam and the others.

The criticism is that the atheists are petulantly debating topics (virgin births, flying horses, dead guys walking around) that no "serious" theologian "really" believes.

It's rather like attending a Christmas party and going on and on about how there's no evidence to support the "Santa hypothesis."

As someone who counts myself among the "new atheists" ("new atheist" = "old atheist + having the balls to say so"), I take this criticism seriously. Most Christmas revelers just want to exchange gifts and sing songs. They're not very invested in Santa and it seems weird to them that anyone would bring it up.

The problem is this. IF you live in a society that celebrates Christmas AND there are a bunch of thugs outside demanding that a "fundamentalist belief" in Santa be respected by all and they're smashing store windows, burning houses and slicing people up, it really doesn't matter if they're a "fringe minority." There are plenty well enough of them.

Is it a mistake to address this problem by writing books like "The Santa Delusion" and "The End of Christmas?" Perhaps. Perhaps this lumps people together who should not be lumped together. Perhaps we lose allies we should otherwise gain.

But the fact remains: Santa does NOT exist and there are roving gangs of thugs causing real harm, right now, based on an insistence that he does and every time you exchange "merry Christmases" with these guys, you validate them.

If there were no fundamentalist religionists, there would be no fundamentalist atheists. Or very few. Why make up a God just to vociferously deny his existence?

So, let's step back from the precipice of not listening to each other. Moderate believers: religion means a lot to you...you don't want it to be represented by intelligent design, jihad, land occupation, suicide bombing and theocracy, DO YOU?

Maybe Jesus was real, maybe he wasn't, maybe Mohammed and Moses are just Luke Skywalker and Mickey Mouse, but you like the stories and the songs and you get something out of projecting your own goodness onto them and you feel attacked when people want to take that away.

So, help us. Join us in condemning religious literalism. Really, you'll find that many "new atheists" can respect a spiritual reverence for poetry just so long as you don't insist that it exists the way Finland exists and demand that public policy validate that position.

You have something worth preserving. So do we. Right now, extremist believers are a threat to both of us. They will sully your poetry and ban our science. That is a greater threat than any minor intellectual movement among snarky non-believers.

And if atheism is a religion, then fine. Have it your way. But if we are a religion, then we deserve the same place at the table and the same respect for moderation that you claim for yourselves. You get to proclaim YOUR beliefs (which, by the way, tacitly or actively deny the beliefs of OTHER religions) all you want. We get three books into proclaiming ours and suddenly we're a threat to Western civilization? Are you so insecure as all that?

Down the road, maybe extremist unbelievers will be a problem and we can deal with that thing then. But right now it's not Stalin or the Khmer Rouge. It's al-Qaeda and the Heritage Foundation.

We really do have to move forward together or stay here forever bickering over tautologies, unfalsifiable arguments, sophistry and semantics.

...that if Genesis described evolution in poetic terms instead of six-day creation, that there would be no religious objection whatsoever to Darwin's theory?

There would be no stubborn insistence for yet more "transitional" forms.

There would be no absurd requirements that a scientific theory be "proven" like a geometric theorem.

There would be no word play over evolution being "just" a theory (science never gets esteems knowledge higher than to label it a "theory.")

There would be no agitation to "teach the controversy" about evolution where no serious controversy exists.

There are more holes, more gaps, more contradictions and more "controversy" in our physical theories (quantum theory, relativity, string theory, loop quantum gravity, the Copenhagen Interpretation, many worlds interpretation, guided wave theory and on and on.)

Our physical theories are rife with the very controversies that DON'T exist in our biological theory. Evolution has no serious scientific competitor. Intelligent design explains nothing and predicts nothing. No epidemiologist, field biologist, microbiologist, biochemist or other life scientist can actually APPLY it in any meaningful way. It's just a philosophical debate.

But for the text of a holy book, we single out one scientific theory...one of our strongest and most useful...for special treatment and we let others...many weaker and more controversial...pass because God never mentioned anything about quantum uncertainty or spacetime dilation.

That's the objection. That's what makes atheists so testy and obnoxious. Willful ignorance is annoying. Sorry, but it is.