Moderates Storm The Religious Battlefield

It is certainly nice to recognize the long-missing religious moderates, but as they "storm ...battlefield(s)", they are not so moderate after all, are they??
And the use of statistics seem to be a bit Churchillian to me: "I believe only the statistics I falsified myself!"
Small hint: We atheist have read some of them recently...

Now, he apparently says that either God is all-powerful (and exercises that power to control everything, as the fundamentalists would have it), or else God does not exist.

It's dishartening to see Newsweek continue to try to marginalize "vociferous atheists" with pieces like this. The statistic that claimed people who don't believe in God account for only 6% of the population was the most disgusting bit - the real number is 30%, according to Harris, up from 14% in 2001.

I am pleased that we are in the process of consciousness-raising in our culture.

However, when The Rev. Timothy Keller, the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church states, "I urge skeptics to wrestle with the unexamined 'blind faith' on which skepticism is based, and to see how hard it is to justify those beliefs to those who do not share them," a clarification is needed.

Marilyn La Court wrote in Secular Nation, ???Words Mere Muffled Muted Metaphors Mocking ??? Meaning??? ??????Faith??? is a powerful bully word that theists use to discredit atheists. A seemingly harmless little word is used to deceive and control. School board members accuse scientists of having faith in evolution. In one step, with one little word, they position evolution and creationism/intelligent design in the same science classroom, each having equal status.

Of course atheists have beliefs. What atheists don???t have is faith.

I know and I believe the cars have stopped at the red light and allowed me to cross the street safely only after I have reached the other side of the street unharmed. I believe without knowing the cars will stop and allow me to cross safely based on probabilities. It???s trust, not faith that gets me from one side of the street to the other. Faith requires neither probabilities nor evidence.

I trust certain people based on their track record or on their reputation. I don???t know that my husband will never cheat on me. I believe that he won???t because experience tells me he is a person who honors his commitments, a person who understands the risks of STD???s, and he has a 30-year track record for being true to his marriage vows. I do not have faith in my husband, I trust him.

Lets be clear and fair about it, atheists base their beliefs on trust. Faith has nothing to do with it.

Randolph - the problem with your 'third way' approach to the Bible and Christianity is that you leave the moral choices in the hands of the individual supplicant. While this approach may seem appealing, especially in light of our uniquely American proclivity for both freedom of conscience and religious piety, it is in fact a kind of 'soft rebuttal' to the Bible being a guide to morality or ethics in any useful sense. You see, either the Bible is the word of God (i.e. 2 Tim 3:16) or it is not, in which case you have a 'buffet-style' Christianity that is so muddled and milquetoast that no one will really be able to relate to it.

I would argue that you are right; it's certainly not all the inerrant word of God, especially when He condemns entire peoples to genocide and condemns anyone who would exercise his much-cherished freedom of conscience to death by stoning (as He does). These things are simply incompatible with any notion of a good and loving God.

But if you leave this door open, even just a crack, you leave hermeneutics and exegesis to do its work without any need for internal validity or consistency. Essentially, anything would be permitted.

If the Bible is even in part merely the work of Man, then it???s just another idol of paper and leatherette.