[MarchHare]

"Our job was to select someone to speak for everybody. And I just couldn't in good conscience vote for a person who doesn't believe in God. Someone who honestly thinks the other ninety five percent of us suffer from some form of mass delusion."

One thing I love about that film is that no matter one's perspective on religion, viewers walk away thinking it supported their side. That's perhaps the greatest tribute there could be to the filmmakers. FWIW, the author of the story, Carl Sagan, was an atheist.

I also think that non-believers account for far more than 5% of the world's population, but that's probably a topic for another thread.

I understand that lots of people don't believe in God. I object to those who cannot afford me the same courtesy because I DO believe in God. It is unfortunate that some cannot talk about faith or religion without inserting perjorative and condescending editorializations into their arguments.

I know very few atheists who would attempt to force their worldview onto others. I think the most common attitude amongst non-believers is one of "live and let live"; you're free to believe whatever the hell you want in the privacy of your own home or place of religious worship. If there's a growing movement of "militant atheism" (for lack of a better term), it's a natural push-back resulting from a trend of increasing religious influence in the public sphere (teaching creationism/ID in school science classrooms, actively fighting against the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV in Africa, etc. to borrow a few recent topics from this forum).

I am a reasonably intelligent, resonably well-educated and generally intellectual person...and I believe there is a God. The last does not invalidate the former.

Ah, but in the mindset of most atheists, belief in God is really no different than belief in the Easter Bunny or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and frankly, it's hard for skeptics to respect the intelligence of believers for that reason. Tell me honestly, you would surely question the intelligence of someone who claimed to have a genuine belief in Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo, and the rest of the Greek pantheon, right? Well, that's how many of us feel about those who believe in other gods.