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Read other letters about this article
I'll take Dawkins, and here is why:
If we doubt things, including ourselves, then we end up acting like better people because we are open to the idea that we may be wrong. For all of the aggressive wording of many of us, most of us, like Dawkins when he was interviewed on the subject, would turn theist if enough evidence presented itself.
The religious right on the same show however, proclaimed that no evidence could ever sway them - and that is the gap between atheism and religion.
What Dawkins said in The God Delusion was nothing new, it was basically a summary of a few atheist arguments, but just because it was nothing new didn't mean it didn't need saying. The ultimate argument for atheism is against faith, it is the idea that we need evidence in order to believe things.
This is the same gap that has the religious proclaiming that atheists can't experience wonder, or that we are essentially amoral, or that we are incapable of art (And you know what? It is the religious left that most frequently makes these claims) or that we are especially nasty bad people who eat puppies.
Meanwhile there are plenty of atheist artists out there, as well as atheists who dedicate their lives to studying the wonder of the world around us. The evidence points away from the claims that atheists are somehow less human, that we are somehow lesser beings to our religious brethren yet the claims still get made. Why? Because the religious accept it on faith.
Just like, not so long ago, a lot of Germans accepted on faith the idea that the Jews were subhuman.
