Atheism is just another form of faith. It's the declaration of the absence of God based on a belief.

Seeing as nobody can prove or disprove God's existence, from where I stand I see two sides of the same coin when it comes to the religion-atheism quarrel.

Being an atheist, and demonizing religious folk for having belief, is hypocrisy, therefore.

Not to mention, the irony of the situation... Atheism is by design the rejection of God. If you reject that something exists, you are, paradoxically, validating someone else's belief if you then fail prove that you are right and they are wrong.

Call it fence sitting if you want... I am unafraid to admit that I have no idea whether there's a god or gods or a heaven or hell or any of that. It's not been in my experience, and I don't have the senses or tools to detect them and measure them even if they were. I am happy to remain skeptical, but open to new information.

In the interests of intellectual honesty and plain old human kindness I don't judge people by how their sense of awe manifests. If then they cross over into being zealots and closed-minded fanatics, or even if they're just unpleasant people, you'll hear me say something bad about 'em. But I give respect when I get respect, and I've for the vast majority of my life been treated with courtesy by the people of faith I have dealt with. I simply don't have a beef with them.

I wasn't raised with religion. Maybe that's the big difference between Tone Stone and me... I'm not running or rebelling from an extreme example of Xtianity. I might very have ended up bitter about religion too. But what I said above would still hold up.