Wrong-o. Religion requires belief, not faith. Atheism is a belief. It requires a conscious decision to deny the existence of a God (or Gods).
Having said that, I pretty much agree with the rest. There is no proof one way or the other; which, pretty-much has been my argument all along here. I'm trying to convince anyone there IS a God, or that there is concrete evidence to support His existence.
My argument has been against those who with no more evidence than I have, try to tell me there absolutely is not, and speak consescending to those who DO believe there is a God as if disbelief makes one intelectually superior.
On the scale of who is "brighter" than who, I would say those who at least have an open mind are brighter than those who have closed theirs.
Belief and faith. Again we're descending into semantics. Belief implies a certainty, possibly based on evidence, that something exists. It can be contrasted to doubt which is a state of uncertainty that something exists. Belief can be arrived at without conclusive evidence. In this thread the existence of Jesus Christ is referred to. Although there's no direct evidence for His existence, save reports of Him written some time after (I'm choosing my words carefully here) left this Earth, over a couple of thousand years and probably billions of people have believed in His existence. The power of circumstantial evidence.
Faith usually exists in the light of belief. Someone can believe in their God, they can have faith that their God will fulfil His promises to the believers. So, for me at least, belief is the progenitor of faith. So if atheism is a belief, then where in athieism - the state of disbelief in deities - is the faith?
I'm a cowardly atheist. I'm willing to discuss my ideas but I find it difficult to proselytise. I watched Dawkins in "The God Delusion" on tv and I cringed each time he forthrightly sallied out and told senior religious figures in various religions that there was no God. It's not that I don't have the courage of my convictions, it's just that telling people they're wrong about their deities is a bit presumptuous. Dawkins has a powerful intellect, aside from his views on religion if you read his scientific work (not papers, I couldn't understand them, I mean his popularly written works on evolutionary biology) you can see it. Armed with that intellect he can confront senior religious people and get into it. I couldn't. I'll just quietly go along until someone makes an issue of it and I'll have my say.
But where I do think Dawkins and his ilk do good work is taking on the deleterious effects of religious belief -
http://richarddawkins.net/article,1992,This-deadly-religious-resistance-to-vaccinations,Johann-Hari
I sometimes envy the muscular atheists and feel that perhaps I'm straddling the atheist/agnostic divide. But I don't worry about it a great deal.
Open and closed minds. An open mind isn't good for religion. Religion works best when it's absorbed and the mind is then tightly shut. Belief. Faith. Doubtless. The firmly closed mind. But of course the closed mind isn't solely the province of the religious believer. The atheist, like Dawkins, can have a firmly closed mind.
I suspect that's why religionists are okay with people who declare their agnosticism, they can still be reached and perhaps will come to God like C.S. Lewis, "Surprised by Joy". But atheists are stubborn, close-minded, not susceptible to religious ideas, they are the true enemy of the religionist. The declaration of someone's atheism ignites many of the more extreme religionists within hearing/viewing distance. Atheists are then accused of "having a religion called atheism", of having "belief in atheism", as if the words used really matter at all.
