No more diversions from me on this, I promise!
jabbajabba wrote:If anything i would consider myself an Agnostic - so to me there are more important pressing matters in the world today.
Agnostic and atheist both share a similarity that essentially says organised religion is not the answer, the agnostic just says there is probably something out there but I'm just not sure what it is. I've said on here before in real life (and not just debating forums) I have no problem with people's choice to believe, I can't prove either way. But it's more the bells and whistles of the stories and structures of organised religion that get me wound up, yet people devote their lives to books written by humans about what they thought God was several millenia ago and we're supposed to bow down and accept it? They can do as they want, as you point out there are more important things in life I'd rather be doing instead, I only have one shot at this - no afterlife, reincarnation or anything for me!
On the point of atheism being just a just the same belief but in scientists, I don't agree. Great scientists publish their works and have generations of subsequent scientists go out to try and prove or disprove it. We can test their theories and the very best ones stand up - take Einstein's Theory of Relativity, one of the cornerstones of the Big Bang theory. When he wrote it, it was just theory. Now we can test it and he was right, that's why he's seen as such a genius. We can take the whole expansion of the universe back to the seconds before the Big Bang. But I concede we don't know the very beginning yet, but it will come.
There is no test for there being a God, there will never be one and so this debate will continue until the world is crushed by the universe collapsing on itself (due to gravity, not God). But from the facts that science provides we can determine that much of the stories of the origins of Earth and life told in organised religion are, well, complete rubbish. Maybe that's why you so many people see atheism (or at the very least agnosticism) as a natural way out, because the fact way outweighs the fiction.